parent categories not showing in permalinks

i’ve been having an issue where some of the links generated by wp are pulling up 404s. after bashing my head in repeatedly and reading 100 support posts concerning permalinks, i realized that the only posts giving me 404s are the ones that are in a child category. the actual link to the post excludes the parent, but the permalink that gets generated includes it. example…

generated permalink:
https://www.domain.com/parent/child/post-title/

actual link:
https://www.domain.com/child/post-title/

does anybody know what i can do to fix this? or is there anything i can change in the code to get the permalink to exclude the parent category and generate the correct link?