Continuing on from FrostyCat, if you do decide to use a parent at any point you can still provide additional functionality within the children for example:
you can have a parent called obj_entities with a create event that contains common variables shared by all living things in your game, you can then have a NEW create event in one of the children and just put event_inherited(); at the beginning which means inherit everything from the parent then anything typed after becomes additional or overriding depending on how you use it.
I'm going to guess you're just using the parent object for collision so this example would be less applicable but an example for this would be:
Code:
inside parent create event:
solid_obj = true;
inside the child step event:
if (image_index == 7){
solid_obj = false;
}
inside the collision code:
if (place_meeting(x+hspd, y, obj_parent) && solid_obj == true){
// run collision
}
I'm not saying this is how you should solve your problem, I'm just giving you a bit of an insight into parent/child relationships as inheritance is a powerful tool that can reduce a lot of duplicate code and provide some interesting functionalities.
My advise is to read up on inheritance as a whole.