ActionScript 3.0 :: MovieClip Recognized As Sprite At Runtime

I'm working on a pause function for my game. Instead of manually writing code to pause all possible animations that a movieclip has, I wrote a function that runs through its children recursively until it reaches the end. For each child it checks to see if it's a movieclip, if so it will run a stop() on it. This works fine, except that I noticed it wasn't pausing my walk cycle.

Upon some investigation I found that while I created the walk cycle as a movieclip, it is recognized by flash as a sprite when the game is actually loaded. This does not make sense because the walk cycle clearly has more than one frame. Adding any kind of code to the MovieClip will stop flash from seeing it as a sprite, so to fix this I can just go into the animation and add '//' to any of the frames.

Code:
public static function togglePauseChildren(curObject:*):void {
if(getQualifiedSuperclassName(curObject)=="flash.display::MovieClip") {
if(curObject.numChildren>0) {
for(var i:uint=0; i<curObject.numChildren; i++) {
var curChild:* = curObject.getChildAt(i);
[Code] .....