Animation Window - Selection of Child Objects

I am having a difficult time understanding how to manipulate my gameobject when using the animation window editor to make an animation.

I have a game object that has a number of child objects which are the pivot points for the legs and such.

I have done the following thus far:

• Selected the main game object.
• Created a new clip
• Added curves for all the pivot points rotations through the add curve button.

I am finding the only way I can select the child object is by directly changing the rotation values in the editor. I can not select the child object in the hierarchy, nor the child object in the scene view window. If I do either of those, then i loose focus of the main game object, and the clip goes away in the animation window.

I have tried things like holding shift or control while selection the child object but it just loose access to the clip since i am not currently selecting the main game object.

Manually editing the values is not very "fun" and would like to be able to rotate the objects with the rotate tool in the scene view while in record mode.

How do I select the child object and not loose the animation reference in the animation window? What am I missing here?