Parent process will not continue without children

[Jalaska13]

I'm writing a startup script that takes a while to execute, so it's making bootup take a long time. I wrote a "launcher" script that just spawns the script as a child process, hoping that the launcher would quit after it had spawned the child, bootup would finish, and the real script would continue in the background. however, when I test it, it seems that the parent process will not continue executing the rest of its code, let alone quit, until the child process has finished. I'm using the & syntax:

subprocess &
rest of launcher script

Any idea how to get this to work?

[Rubberman]

Try starting it with nohup.

[Jalaska13]

Start the parent or child? (I'm assuming you mean child)
And will that mean that the parent would continue in parallel to the child? It's not that the parent quits and the child quits at the same time, it's that the parent waits until the child has exited to even continue onto the next line of code past invoking the child.