Way to stop recursion?

Been banging my head against the wall for days and starting to think 
there is no way to do what I need. Hoping someone on here can prove me 
wrong.

UPDATE rules work perfectly for what I need to do except I need them to 
only run once, not try and recurse (which of course isn't allowedby 
postgresql anyway). Triggers seem a less efficient way to do the same 
thing, though I understand they would run recursively too. Here's the 
table structure in question:

CREATE TABLE parent (id INT, cola CHAR(1), common CHAR(1));
CREATE TABLE child (id INT, parent_id INT, cola(1), common(1));
INSERT INTO parent VALUES(1, 'adult', 0);
INSERT INTO child VALUES(1, 1, 'kid 1', 0);
INSERT INTO child VALUES(2, 1, 'kid 2', 0);

What I need, is when "common" is changed for a parent, then that new 
value is reflected in "common" for all the children, ie:

UPDATE parent SET cola='something', common=1 WHERE id=1;

That in itself is no problem:

CREATE RULE update_child_common AS ON UPDATE TO parent WHERE 
NEW.common!=OLD.common DO UPDATE child SET common=NEW.common WHERE 
parent_id=OLD.id;

Problem is, when "common" is changed for a child, I need the parent and 
all siblings to reflect that value too, ie:

UPDATE child SET cola='some value',common=2 WHERE id=2;

If I could force recursion off, I could do that with:

CREATE RULE update_common_from_child AS ON UPDATE TO child WHERE 
NEW.common!=OLD.common DO (UPDATE parent SET common=NEW.common WHERE 
id=NEW.parent_id;UPDATE child SET common=NEW.common WHERE 
parent_id=NEW.parent_id)

As it stands, I can not find a way to do that. Any variation I try 
(using "flags", using INSTEAD, triggers) has led to recursion protection 
kicking in and postgresql refusing to run the query. I want to stay away 
from triggers if I can as I imagine they must be significantly less 
efficient when updating large numbers of parents and/or children at once 
(which happens frequently in the application), assuming a trigger could 
be made to do what I need at all.

Hoping I'm missing something obvious...

- Jonathan