Get child component of a prefab to reference with another prefab

I have multiple prefabs that have scripts that will need to reference the children of the player prefab but there doesn't seem to do this in the inspector. I don't entirely understand why thats not possible given that the children are prefab'ed too and the reference should just be able to trace it via inspector the same way you might in code. That being said, given that I can't seem to do it in the inspector, I know i can call getchild on getchild on getchild to get these child objects but its really frustrating to do it by index number. I mess with the order of my child objects frequently and i dont want to keep rearranging the indexes in code everytime for multiple different scripts. Is there a way to access a child object of a prefab by name, or better yet a fix for not being able to plug in a child object of a prefab in the inspector?

thank you.