And here everything was going so smoothly and I thought it was working the way it should.
I had the subforums collapsed to save space and everything above the restricted section was fine. I tried a few things but it seems to be a glitch in the backend somewhere. All the settings and permissions are the same for all the forums but they still don't show.
To fix the problem I have set the subforums to expanded. It does add a bit of scroll time when looking throuhg the forums but at least we will all see if there are new posts in the subforums.