Beginner child theme question

I have a theme that I have created a child theme to. I have successfully done that and have been making changes to the theme from my child theme’s css file. The theme has a settings page which gets created from a file called settings.php. I copied that into my child theme, but that doesn’t seem to work. If I make changes in that file, nothing happens in the theme. I know the file is the right one, as in the parent theme, my changes do show.

I am so new to this, that I don’t even know where to start to look. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!