Display child pages on homepage template

Question

I thought this would be a simple case of following the Codex but apparently not. I'm trying to display child pages of a particular page on my homepage using a custom made template. So far I've managed to display what I want in terms of the content but I can't achieve my goal which is to display child pages of one selected page.

The page I want has an ID of 37. Yet using child_of or parent it ignores it and shows every single page. Below if my code:

                    <?php $home_pages = new WP_Query(array(
                        'sort_order'    => 'DESC',
                        'sort_column'   => 'post_date',
                        'post_type'     => 'page',
                        'post_status'   => 'publish'
                    ));
                        if( $home_pages->have_posts() ) : ?>
                        <ul>
                            <?php $pages_per = 0; 
                            while( $home_pages->have_posts() && $pages_per < 6 ) : $home_pages->the_post(); ?>
                                <li>
                                    <?php if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) : ?>
                                        <?php the_post_thumbnail(); ?>
                                    <?php else : ?>
                                        <img src="images/noimage.png" border="0" alt="No Thumbnail" />
                                    <?php endif; ?>
                                    <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" class="title"><?php the_title(); ?></a>
                                    <?php $pages_per++; ?>
                                </li>
                            <?php endwhile; ?>
                        </ul>
                        <?php endif; ?>
                        <?php wp_reset_postdata(); wp_reset_query(); ?>

The code shows six pages as instructed in the loop but doesn't seem to filter out any pages. The above example doesn't use child_of and parent but that's because I tried them and it didn't work.

For reference: https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_pages

Answer 1

I figured it out. It looks as if the Codex never referenced the one parameter I needed to make it work in the Codex. I checked out this site here for a full list of parameters in the arrays http://www.billerickson.net/code/wp_query-arguments/

I needed to use post_parent and not child_of or parent. Fixed.