Here is a cross posted link from reddit where I asked my original question. It contains video and pictures showing in detail the issue.
This was a myriad of issues that I got solved. Turns out, I hadnt created a proper physics asset for the child(even though I did for the parent… dumb me). After that I needed to set the collision settings on the skeletal mesh in the blueprint to have custom collisions along with query/physics and set its type to world dynamic, and then everything worked like a charm.