Without knowing exactly what you are tying to do, perhaps an alternative is to implement your parent class functionality as a service. This is definitely a more complex route and requires a more cautious approach to coding and error handling but it would allow you to use a "standard" tab and give you direct access to all the bits contained within the tab control. Obviously this is more of a kludge but may provide a way to refactor the code that you want to re-use.
You can see a similar approach in the pfc_save service - it handles both standard "saveable" controls and pfc-based controls equally (though it requires the use of a pfc-based window AFAIK).