 <p>I think what you will see is just differences in coding practice.</p> <p>If all child classes have the same exact <code>init()</code> method, there is no reason to even have the method declared within the child classes.</p> <p>In some cases, however I have seen developers do exactly what you have shown. In a lot of cases this may because the eventual intent may be to somehow augment the parent method behavior in a way specific to the class. In other cases, I have seen some collection of children classes override the functionality, so the developer puts a method like this in all child classes just so the intent (execute parent method as is for this child class) is clear to other developers.</p>