Your code is difficult to understand because it was not wrapped in "code" tags. Please modify your node to add code tags (see Writeup Formatting Tips).

Next, please use warnings; use strict;, then clean up any errors and warnings.

That being said, I tried using perltidy to clean up your code the best I could, and I still got an error:

Can't call method "0" on unblessed reference
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How many children do you expect in your code? 1?

my $cnt = 0;
for (keys %barry) {$cnt++ if $_ eq 'children'}
print "cnt=$cnt\n";
__END__
cnt=1
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