MovieClips inside other MovieClips - detecting all

I have a movieclip called mapWindow, inside mapWindow are dynamically created movieclips of various sizes. The movieclips inside the mapWindow don’t take up the entire space of the mapWindow and thus I use a startDrag on the mapWindow upon detection of a mouse press. The problem is, I don’t want the start drag to start if the mouse is detected over any of the child movieclips inside mapWindow.

I have a few ideas of how to proceed, but I’m not sure how to reference all child movieclips of a particular movieclip - or something along those lines.

It would be easy to use the hittest function if I knew how to reference all the movieclips I need to, but alas…

Thanks in advance.