Associate child categories only to an entry When adding a Categories field to a section, if you select only child categories, Craft automatically selects the parent categories too. I emailed Craft support about this and they explained it's by design and the workaround is to use a Structure instead of Categories.

I'm unhappy with this as a workaround and was hoping their was another way to do this, either with a custom plugin or something else?

Any help much appreciated

Thanks!
I managed to workaround this by creating my own custom fieldtype which is 99% the code from the Craft CategoriesFieldType, but with the only difference being I removed the call to craft()-&gt;categories-&gt;fillGapsInCategoryIds($categoryIds).

This works but I've yet to see if it causes any side-effects I need to worry about.