Will the published child stay published?
It will.
For example I have a site with a Shop organized with Collections (basically just an extra to help you manage many child pages from a resource). My shop has the following setup:
- Shop
- Category 1
- Product
- Category 2
- Product
- Category 1
Shop, Category and Product are all resources. My Shop resource runs a template which will list an overview of all Products. Each Category will only list an overview of its own children Products. If I unpublish any Category resource, the Shop resource will still show the Products from that unpublished Category.
So as long as your template contains a specific call for those children, they should show up (despite their parent being unpublished).
The published child will stay published, but in some cases, you have to put the children in a resource group and attach it to a user group the user belongs to with a policy of “load, list, and view” in order to make it visible.
Could you please elaborate on which situation that would be necessary?
I could be confusing this with having the parent protected, but I think one case might be Wayfinder failing to show the children in menus.