Entity Framework 6 Load child table to one level to avoid Self referencing loop detected for property

Question

I have entities organized as below.

class parent
{
 public virtual ICollection<child> childList { get; set; }
}

class child
{
 public virtual parent p { get; set; }
}

Here when I serialized, I get the error of

Self referencing loop detected for property

So I need to tell entity framework to fetch me only the first level of data, i.e. when accessing parent class, fetch only parent object with childs and keep the parent object in child null.