Parenting a sprite pixel perfect to an animated sprite

Hi, I have an animated sprite of a running character and a separate sprite of a helmet.Sometimes the character wears the helmet sometimes it doesn't. When the helmet is parented to the character I'd like it to move up and down with the running animation. So my question is, how to do this in an efficient way? What I think I should do is to create several sprite boxes around the helmet image with different offsets. But I don't know how to select the proper ones related to the character animation because I have no visual comparison. Is there a way to use the animation tool with an animated sprite as background reference? So I can see the helmet's position on the character? Thanks