transform changes don't cause movement after the parent entity is despawned

[or-n]

I have an enemy in defender clone and add a person bundle to it. When it it hit, all its children which are found in the person_query have the state set to 'falling' and the enemy is despawned. After that transform changes don't affect the person

[Davier]

If I understand correctly, you despawn an entity, and then modify its children's Transform, but they don't move.
The children probably still have their Parent component. Since their parent is invalid, their GlobalTransforms are no longer updated.
You have to remove the Children/Parent components when despawning the entity:

commands.entity(parent).clear_children().despawn();

However, when you do so, the children will set their global transform to their local transform, which is probably not what you want. You will need to update their transform:

*transform = global_transform.reparented_to(GlobalTransform::default());

[or-n]

I'd probably do that, but now I see another issue. The parent entity scale is inherited and I don't want that