Animation Event Keys Not Triggering Due to Low Framerate?

Our project is using Unity 5.3.4p4.

We are using AnimationEvent and event keys(in the inspector) in our FBX animations to control parenting switches in our game(imagine a pencil being parented to a hand, and then to the world or similar; this switch is handled with event keys in our game).

We are finding that the event keys often get skipped when the game's processes lag/framerate drops, causing our switch not to trigger.

Is there any way to prevent this from happening? Is there another way to link a parent switch to an animation (we have over 50 animations that need this sort of switching to occur, so hand coding each one is not really a good solution for us).

I have looked at other similar questions, but haven't been able to find an answer.

Thank you in advance.