I created a child portal by creating a template from another one of my child portals.  They basically will have the smae modules but the content will change.  so everything worked ok with the template but now that I started modifying the content in some modules I realized that I was modifying the content on my original child portal.  Basically it goes back and forth, so if I correct my original, the new child portal changes.  How do I make sure both stand on their own?

Try login as portal admin instead of host when you are making changes or else make sure you don't login with super user account.