You can customize whether to also select the child nodes when a parent node is selected. You can choose to always select the child nodes with the parent node, to never do so, or to determine based on a per-object setting. You can select one of these options from the Preferences window (Windows > Settings/Preferences > Preferences), under Selection preferences, via the Selection Child Highlighting drop-down list.
If you choose to determine this based on a per-object setting (that is, you select Use object highlight setting from the drop-down list), you can disable the Selection Child Highlighting option in this section of the Attribute Editor so that the child node is not highlighted when its parent is selected. If you leave this option enabled, then this child node is highlighted when its parent is selected.