Inheritance of files for parent/child branches

The only redeeming feature in AccuRev was the ability to an use inheritance for files in streams (nearly analogous to branches). While this idea in the SCM world sounds strange, is there anything in git land that could mimic this sort of behavior?

In case, "inheritance for files..." isn't clear, what I would like to accomplish is: have a branch "parent" with multiple "children" branches (which may have descendents of their own). If a file is committed to the parent branch, then the all the descendents would receive the same update without manually cherry-picking the commit across all the branches.

Adam