Is there a way I can force child entities to be persisted before the parent object?

You would get a foreign key constraint violation.

First of all, the IDs are all assigned and there are timestamps for versioning.

I am working against a very heavily contrained Oracle DB with FK rules. Currently, I am getting a FK violation because Hibernate executes an insert on an object that aggregates another object (many-to-one) before the aggregated object is inserted.

Does this make sense?

No, you have to show your mapping. You are probably missing an inverse="true" and want the exact opposite of what you described first.

I probably used parent-child inappropriately here