Indirectly, the parent node *does* include state information like info about number of nodes. Not directly, i.e. in the node's attribute map. But indirectly, via the getChildren() and getChildrenNames() methods. If your application uses those methods and counts on transactional consistency in the results, that's when you'd set lockParentForChildInsertRemove to true. Personally I've never written an app where I needed to set lockParentFroChildInsertRemove to true. View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4266324#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...