No collision between child components

I have a spring arm attached to a sphere (which is the root-component), and a camera attached to the spring arms socket. The spring arm collides with everything in the world, but not the sphere that it is attached to. This causes the camera to go straight through the sphere which is not what I want. I have read that child components don’t test for collision or “sweep” with other child components. There has been discussion about this issue in the past but no solution out of what I found. Is there anyway to get the camera/spring arm to collide with the sphere it is attached to? Or is this a limitation?

Thanks for your help.