Give the child form a reference to the parent's status bar directly OR make
the status bar public and cast Parent to <your form> OR give the child form
an event that the parent can subscribe to OR examine the members of the
parent object using reflection, find the statusbar and update it's members.
Suffice to say, there's lots of ways.
--
Bob Powell [MVP]
Visual C#, System.Drawing
Image transition effects, automatic persistent configuration and
design time mouse operations all in April's issue of Well Formed http://www.bobpowell.net/wellformed.htm