Insert relational models laravel eloquent - php

Question

I am new to eloquent for laravel 4 and i can't quite figure out on how to make and save related models.
Table Messages: id | user | message | parent
For example:
class Message extends Eloquent {
public function user(){
return $this->belongs_to('User', 'id');
}
public function child(){
return $this->hasMany('Message', 'parent');
}
public function parent(){
return $this->belongs_to('Message', 'id')
}
}
So if you have a conversation you have a message, this message may or may not have a child or a parent and always has a user which made the message. So if i want to save a conversation this way, how would i do this?
For example, i have to following conversation:
John (1) says: Hi all!
Mark (3) responds: Hey there!
Hans (4) responds: Hi john
Peter(2) responds: Goodmorning.
Now i am john and i would like to save this conversation as below:
id | user | message | parent
========================================
1 | 1 | Hi, All! | NULL
2 | 3 | Hey there! | 1
3 | 4 | Hi john | 1
4 | 2 | Goodmorning. | 1
I can save them all separately but i figure there has to be a better way than below:
$parent = NULL;
foreach($messages as $message){
$model = new Message;
$model->user = $message['user'];
$model->message = $message['value'];
if(!is_null($parent)){
$model->parent = $parent;
}
$model->save();
if(is_null($parent)){
$parent = $model->id;
}
}

Answer 1

The initial problem I saw was that you are saying that the message's parent is always itself, you need to specify an additional unsigned integer to relate on. Here's one example:
public function parent(){
return $this->belongs_to('Message', 'parent_id')
}
You need to use that same 'parent_id' for the children as well:
public function children(){
return $this->hasMany('Message', 'parent_id');
}