Setting transparent background Win32

What I'm trying to do is very simple but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information on it. Basically I have a normal non-transparent parent window and I want to place a child window (that has its own non-transparent controls) inside that parent window. So the only thing I have to do is to set the background brush of the child window transparent, but it still draws a white background. Tried using WS_EX_LAYERED style and SetLayeredWindowAttributes but it makes the child window invisible.