Omer - thanks for the response.  I guess I can live with it - its a small hassle for what I'm trying to do

Davo: This turns out to be a bug in OneNote. Macro is correctly setting those paragraphs as selected, but OneNote doesn't show them as selected. If the parent isn't selected, the child is then shown as selected, but when parent is also selected, OneNote drops selection for all children. You can reproduce this by selecting both the parent and child, and then go to Settings > Show Page XML, which would have both of them marked as selected="all", then click OK to save the page back to OneNote without any modification and OneNote will remove selection from the children, demonstrating the bug.

Omer - sorry for mispelling your name below.  In my case, I'm looking to make a macro to select all unchecked "parent" tags and all of their "children", using some of the code here (I cut all selected (my remaining) tasks and move them to a new page).  I'm running into the same problem - it won't select the children (although everything else works fine).  In my case, the "parent" wouldn't be checked unless all the children are checked.  So if a parent is unchecked, I would want to select all of the children, regardless of status.