5.3 Niagara custom components don't have a working tick event?

I created a custom niagara system component, to whihc I then created children. When I sent a signal to one of these children to enable tick and disable it a second later, it wouldn’t ever execute event tick. When I tried to have it have tick enabled from the start it wouldn’t execute tick. When I created this component, it came with a disabled event tick node, so I assumed I could use tick in it, but nothing I did ever made it fire off. does anyone know why this could be?