How can you get the parent of a UIElement?

Ok, I know that FrameworkElement, which is a direct subclass of UIElement, has a Parent property, but Panels have children of type UIElement, not FrameworkElement (Children is of type UIElementCollection) which seems it would mean you can add UIElements directly to a Panel.

That said, if you have a UIElement and want to see if it has a parent that's a panel, the only way I know how to test this is with the VisualTreeHelper, but that's the visual tree, not the logical tree. (At least we know a Panel doesn't have a template so maybe that's the way, but still...)

So asides from the VisualTreeHelper, does anyone know how to know which panel is the parent of a UIElement? (...and have any thoughts why they didn't just define a Parent property there instead of on FrameworkElement?)

Thanks!