Cocos2dx sublayers

Cocos2dx sublayers

I am developing a 2D games with cocos2dx, in which I am still very new...
inside the game, there's a number of UI Elements that I'd like to group
together as one (I intend to group them into CCLayers). For example a few
text labels and sprites form a CStatBar which is a CCLayer. This CStatBar
will then be included in the various other CCLayer
How do I do that? I created the CStatBar class and then, inside the
containing class's init() function, I CStatBar::create() and call
this->addChild(pStatBar) however, the statbar did not appear... is there
any obvious thing that I missed? All the positions are correct. Thanks!
EDIT:
Notes: 1. ccTouchesBegan of the sublayer is called, however it is not
rendered/seen 2. How do I resize the sublayer so that it only cover
partial area of the parent layer? Supposedly the CStatBar should only
cover 10% of the top area of the screen, not the whole screen...