Orientation strategy for mobile. Best practice?

It can get complicated it you want to send an event with data attached, so it could be that the simpler approach would be to have two listeners in each child. Something like this, in each child that needs to rearrange things:

stage.addEventListener("go portrait",goportrait);

stage.addEventListener("go landscape",golandscape);

function goportrait(e:Event){

//do what this child needs when going to portrait

}

function golandscape(e:Event){

//do what this child needs when going to landscape

}

Then in the orientation listener on the stage you would do:

dispatchEvent(new Event("goportrait"));

or:

dispatchEvent(new Event("golandscape"));

You'll read in some places about how it's bad practice to use strings like that, and that you should set up constants with the strings in them. But, using strings is quick and easy, and has no drawbacks at runtime.