Thanks for all of the feedback.

I ended up following just about everybody's advice and have ended up with a solution that seems to work. I gave up on inheritance and instead gave each Child (though no longer a child, per se) à copy of the Parent objet.

I was actually surprised to see that, from the child objet, I could still call the parent methods, by doing this :

$child->{_parent_object}->method();
[download]

Still not sure that is a good idea, but it seems to work for the time being.

Thanks again

s-t