How do I create a hierarchy in python? Some elements include iterables

I have some JSON data that gives me information back about my "nodes". One of the data elements for a node is "children" which will contain zero through N number of numbers. What I am trying to accomplish is to start at the top level ID of the hierarchy and work my way down. I've tried create a dict with the name of the top-level element, then have lists within the dict, but I can't seem to iterate all the data without having a disgusting amount of nested if statements.

What I am trying to get out of it is a dict of lists eg: mydict = {'name':'mydatacenter', 'rooms':'a list of the child rooms (of the specific datacenter)', 'rows':'a list of the child row (of rooms) etc etc

Here is example JSON:

{
   "status": "OK",
   "output":
   {
       "nodes":
       [
           {
               "children":
               [
                   -6
               ],
               "type_id": 5,
               "type": "datacenter",
               "id": -7,
               "name": "mydatacenter"
           },
           {
               "children":
               [
                   -5
               ],
               "type_id": 4,
               "type": "room",
               "id": -6,
               "name": "myroom"
           },
           {
               "children":
               [
                   -4
               ],
               "type_id": 3,
               "type": "row",
               "id": -5,
               "name": "myrow"
           },
           {
               "children":
               [
                   -3,
                   -2
               ],
               "type_id": 2,
               "type": "rack",
               "id": -4,
               "name": "myrack"
           },
           {
               "children":
               [
                   1,
                   0
               ],
               "type_id": 1,
               "type": "host",
               "id": -2,
               "name": "myhost1"
           },
           {
               "status": "up",
               "name": "process.0",
               "exists": 1,
               "type_id": 0,
               "reweight": "1.000000",
               "crush_weight": "0.009995",
               "depth": 5,
               "type": "process",
               "id": 0
           },
           {
               "status": "up",
               "name": "process.1",
               "exists": 1,
               "type_id": 0,
               "reweight": "1.000000",
               "crush_weight": "0.009995",
               "depth": 5,
               "type": "process",
               "id": 1
           },
       "stray":
       [
       ]
   }
}

I found this example, which helps me understand a little bit, but I'm not sure how to handle the fact that I will always have to iterate from datacenter all the way down.