You can transform an object and its pivot without affecting its children using the buttons in Adjust Transform rollout. Adjusting an object's transforms has no effect on any children linked to that object.
To scale a parent without scaling the children:
The children will remain unaffected.
To reinitialize the scale of an object:
The XYZ values are re-initialized to 100%. This operation prevents Non-uniform Scale inheritance if a child object is linked to this object.
This does not affect descendants.
When applied to closed groups, it aligns the dummy node of the parent, but keeps the children in the same place. It reorients and resizes the dummy node to correctly bind the children of the group.
You can use the Scale to correct Non Uniform Scale inheritance problems. If Non Uniform Scale is inherited by a child object in a hierarchy, it can result in an undesirable deformation in the child object. To correct for this, use Reset: Scale in the Adjust Transform rollout on an object before linking.
You can view the scale values of the transformation matrix of a selected object. On the toolbar, turn on Scale, then right-click any of the three toolbar Transform buttons (Move, Rotate, or Scale).
There is also a Reset XForm utility to do the same tasks.