I guess the alternative would be to take the save out of DESTROY, and explicitly save the data to the DB ..?

That way, a call to, say, $self->Parent::Save would save using the child data, and you can simply bypass the save when the parent is destroyed.

After all, if no changes are made in the child no save of the parental data should be needed anyway (if I'm reading this right).

Just a thought ..
-- Foxcub