When you wrote
.parent() you probably were thinking of what
.closest() is for.
.closest() crawls up the DOM tree until it finds a match among ALL of the ancestors of an element. .parent() only goes to the immediate parent.
In any case, for your need here the first solution I showed you is best. But if you ever need to search "up, then down", .closest('something').find('something-else') is dandy!