I’ve found that references to the child character breaks the childs mesh or animation reference or changed default settings(even in a new blueprint with no circular dependency).
I can , however, reference the children in an array in the parents blueprint(the only blueprint that will allow a reference to them) without this happening.
So my workaround is to pick up this array from the parent in the gamemode at runtime, and use it as a reference to the children . Seems to work so far.