My problem is that if a Parent class contains a collection of Child classes
and they are to be lazily loaded.
How can I load a Parent object, through a Query, with its collection uninitialized?

can't really understand your pb
will load myObjects wo initializing their lazy collections

To be more specific,

When I load my Parent object using session.load() the object is loaded but its collection of Child objects are not initialized since they are to be lazily loaded later.
I want to achieve this same kind of loading by using a hibernate query
The problem that Im facing is that when I try to load Parent using a query
supposing session.iterate("from Parent"), its collection also gets initialized which I dont want it to be. I want the collection to be lazily loaded that is when I access them.
Im confused as to which hibernate api's method to use to achieve my requirement.

Thanx in advance for any suggestions and tips

Session.iterate("from Parent") should definately not initialize lazy collections. You are surely refering to your collection somewhere in your code causing it to be initialized. Please show us your code if you don't find this yourself.

Not loading collections is the default behavior, what is the query that fetch your collections despite the lazy loading ?
You don't use the fetch keyword, do you ?

Here is my code:

I have an Employee object which contains a collection of PhoneNumbers

Employee emp;
Iterator it = session.iterate("from Employee where id=6");

if(it.hasNext())
emp = (Employee)it.next();

System.out.println(Hibernate.isInitialized(emp.getPhoneNos()));

The last statement prints "true".

Even if both Employee and Phone were declared to have a proxy, then would the entire Phone (proxy) collection be initialized if Employee (proxy) was accessed like in the code above?

Declaring Phone as a proxyed class won't lazy load the collection but the objects contained in the collection.
Use <set lazy="true"> to lazy a collection