Is there any way to find if an element has a certain child or not?

[ghost]

So, the page that I am parsing. It has a td tag within that in some cases it has a tag and in some cases it doesn't have.
However, i have tried this $row->find('td', 2)->find('a', 0) and it says can't find value on null.
Is there anyway to find the child exists or not?

One way that I have found is count($row->find('td', 2)->find('a', 0)) and if it returns 1 basically there's a child and otherwise none.
Is there any other way to find it?
Thanks in advance.