Make absolute positioned div expand parent div hei

Question

As you can see in the CSS below, I want child2 to position itself before child1. This is because the site I'm currently developing should also work on mobile devices, on which the child2 should be at the bottom, as it contains the navigation which I want below the content on the mobile devices. - Why not 2 masterpages? This is the only 2 divs which are repositioned in the entire HTML, so 2 masterpages for this minor change is an overkill.

HTML:

<div id="parent">
    <div class="child1"></div>
    <div class="child2"></div>
</div>

CSS:

parent { position: relative; width: 100%; }
child1 { width: auto; margin-left: 160px; }
child2 { width: 145px; position: absolute; top: 0px; bottom: 0px; }

child2 has dynamic height, as different subsites could have more or less navigation items.

I know that absolute positioned elements are removed from the flow, thus ignored by other elements.
I tried setting overflow:hidden; on the parent div, but that didn't help, neither does the clearfix.

My last resort will be javascript to reposition the two divs accordingly, but for now I'll try and see if there exist a non-javascript way of doing this.

Answer 1

This is very similar to what @ChrisC suggested. It is not using an absolute positioned element, but a relative one. Maybe could work for you

<div class="container">
  <div class="my-child"></div>
</div>

And your css like this:

.container{
    background-color: red;
    position: relative;
    border: 1px solid black;
    width: 100%;
}

.my-child{
    position: relative;
    top: 0;
    left: 100%;
    height: 100px;
    width: 100px;
    margin-left: -100px;
    background-color: blue;
}

https://jsfiddle.net/royriojas/dndjwa6t/