Parent size does not reflect content size

Hi,

The main goal is to calculate the container’s height for a touch based scroller. I am not using the built-in touch API.

So I have an object that creates content. It means you provide an URL, some text and it loads the photo, and displays the text and adds them on the baseclass (Sprite)

The problem is that when using this object to create content, I cannot get the instance’s height property because lets say the content is 150 but the instance property returns 31.5.
At the moment I have a method in the object that returns the content’s height which returns the correct height but this means that when I add multiple different instances I cannot just get the scroll container’s height because that gives a much smaller value.

So my question is, in what situation a parent’s height would not reflect its content’s height?

Thanks
Greg