Walk Cycle Isssues

At quick glance, the "waist" tag shouldn't be in a layer called body the torso, but rather on the main Body group itself (along with the hip tags).

It is hard to be sure, but from screenshot it looks like you have too many independent layers. Each groups should have at least one child that is not independent. For your head, it would be the facebackground. Independent means "start a new mesh so this artwork does not warp with parent mesh". If all children are independent, there is nothing in the parent mesh to attach to (it's empty). So normally the main artwork for a layer is not marked independent.