A Child theme is a WordPress theme that inherits its functionality from another WordPress theme, the parent theme. Child themes are often used when you want to customize or tweak an existing WordPress theme without losing the ability to upgrade that theme. In the past, there was no easy way of updating WordPress themes without losing all the custom styling and changes that you had made. This becomes chaos when all the sudden you find out a widely used script in popular themes has a major exploit, and you need to update your themes ASAP. It becomes a tough choice because on one hand, you would lose all the custom styles if you update.