Noob: Reference function in main class from called obj

Greets, everybody. I am a long time lurker who has finally decided to try to learn some as3. I am amazed how often these forums give better answers than adobe’s actual help files. This one has me stumped, however. It may be that I am just missing some fundamental idea.

My main class calls an array of persistent objects that do things such as load pictures, audio clips, etc. These objects have control buttons, etc.

What I don’t understand is how to feedback information from these objects back to the main, initial loading parent class.

obj.parent.callbackfunction() seems reasonable but doesn’t work.

setting obj.variable and then polling it constantly from the parent seems wasteful.

Thanks for the help in advance.