As Tux mentioned, it would be helpful to see some sample code. I can only offer some general suggestions.

I will say that it can be tricky when you are using HTML::TreeBuilder to search for "text". In the following example, the visual text that you see displayed is actually split up between different nodes.

<h2><i>Real-Life</i> Police Investigations</h2>
[download]

This might be related to why you see different numbers of child contents. Another example is

<div id=1>
  <div id=2>
    <h2>Spring 2019 Season</h2>
      <div id=3>
      Content...
[download]

Whenever I'm searching for text as it's displayed to the user, I definitely take advantage of the as_text() method of HTML::Element. Maybe check if you are at the deepest/shallowest level by checking if the as_text() result of the current node is the same/different as the as_text() result of the parent/child node.