Since you have an IK, it should be relatively easy: just set the IK controller's parent to the root instead of the hips.
BUT, ideally, you want to be able to use both depending on the situation. In which case, you also want to add Child of constraints to your IK controllers, pointing to your hips controller. Then you can turn that constraint on and off via its weight:
If you want even more control, you can even use separate Copy Location and Copy Rotation instead of Child Of
Yes, from Pose Mode in the Bone Constraints tab you can select the bone you want to act as the child and add a "Child Of" constraint. Point it to the armature, then within that the bone, that you want it to copy transformations of.
You'll probably need to uncheck the X rotation transformation, because bone axes are wonky (that's a technical explanation). Maybe someone else can explain why, but I've just come to accept it as the way it is. In any case, this works.
Extruding from the base of a bone doesn't automatically create a parent relationship.
The bones won't move each other in edit mode because edit mode is for positioning/creating bones. However, the leg bone will now be parented in pose mode.
These bones are probably part of 2 different armatures. If for some reason you really want to parent a bone of an armature to a bone of another armature you can use a Child Of bone constraint:
I did not find a solution to my problem, but I did find a great alternative. Looking at another question I learned that constraints would be much better for parenting in an animation.
Link to other question here: Animate the parenting of an object
Hope this helps anyone else with a similar problem
