David,

First thing is classes inherit, objects do not.

The object concept you are referring to is called delegation. That is where an object delegates the responsibility for an action to some other object. The other object my its container (your word parent) or it may some other unrelated object.

The term inheritance means that a sub class HAS the behavior of its superclass, it doesn't call the superclass for that behavior. One actual definition of inheritance is, "The ability of one class to obtain all or part of its definition from another class." In your object example the contained (child) object does not have the behavior in question, instead it is delegating to the container object which has the behavior.