How to move child element from one parent to another using jQuery

As Jage's answer removes the element completely, including event handlers and data, I'm adding a simple solution that doesn't do that, thanks to the detach function.

var element = $('#childNode').detach();
$('#parentNode').append(element);

Edit:

Igor Mukhin suggested an even shorter version in the comments below:

$("#childNode").detach().appendTo("#parentNode");

Detach is unnecessary.

The answer (as of 2013) is simple:

$('#parentNode').append($('#childNode'));

According to http://api.jquery.com/append/

You can also select an element on the page and insert it into another:

$('.container').append($('h2'));

If an element selected this way is inserted into a single location elsewhere in the DOM, it will be moved into the target (not cloned).