what is the best way to deal with local dependencies on submodules in node?

In our environment we have a node app with a dependency on a submodule which is also a node module. We ran into issues using npm link so we tried using local dependencies (i.e. setting the value of the dependency in package.json to file:./path/to/dep). The problem with this is that when you make a change in the submodule you have to then bump the version & update it in the parent. Is there a better way of dealing with this type of dependency so that I can just make changes in my submodule and have it just propagate to the parent?