Ok so a bit of testing and what I did was set them manually in the editor of the child blueprint off of “Begin Play” which made it work as I described in the OP then I ran the editor:
after stopping the editor I deleted the nodes off of “begin play” and tried to edit the class default values again and it seems to have worked:
I’m not sure why this seems to be fixing the issue…? Almost as if I’m unsticking the variable. 
In any case thank you for walking through this with me.