Do I make all children a public GameObject within the parent to access them

Questions & Answers
1

I have a parent that is managing all the children within it. All it does is just change the sprite of each child to certain ones.

Is there a better was to access the children than making them a reference of a public GameObject within the parent. I want to have more control over them, like calling functions without using SendMessage, getting values and changing positions.

2

Make them into an array of GameObjects in the parent object?

So the parent can have something like:

public GameObject childrenList;  // Perhaps even static? 

void Start(){
    // For each children or specific children, add them to the array childrenList. 
}

Easier to manage and control now.