Is it good practice to use ordinal of enum? [closed]

Answer 1

This is not a direct answer to your question. Rather better approach for your usecase. This way makes sure that next developer will explicitly know that values assigned to properties should not be changed.

Create a class with static properites which will simulate your enum:

public class Persons {
    final public static int CHILD = 0;
    final public static int PARENT = 1;
    final public static int GRANDPARENT = 2;
}

Then use just like enum:

Persons.CHILD

It will work for most simple use cases. Otherwise you might be missing on options like valueOf(), EnumSet, EnumMap or values().