So far, I've had no luck in finding a plugin or a hack that will allow this to happen. So for anyone who is trying to accomplish the same thing. Here's what I did to work-around the problem. Be forewarned, it's messy. :-)
I only had about 10 pages that I needed to do this for, so if you have alot, I wouldn't recommend doing it this way.
First I installed 2 Plugins to accomplish this.
Page Lists Plus and
Redirection
First, I moved all my pages that I had created as child pages, OUT from under their parent Page. Then I created new blank child pages, UNDER the parent page, keeping the titles similar so I would know what page it was meant to redirect to. Using the Page Lists Plus options while creating the new pages, I included the "Redirect to" feature and inserted the page I wanted it to redirect to. I also checked "Include in Page Lists" and "Link" boxes.
Then in the Atahualpa Menu bar theme options, I inserted the page ids for all the original pages I had moved OUTSIDE of the in the area to EXCLUDE them from the menu. Otherwise they will all list individually in your menu bar.
I could have stopped here, but I found that the Page Lists Plus redirect still allowed you to access the pages using the parent/xxx.html link, and I did NOT want that to happen. So I used the Redirection Plugin (Options found under Tools) to add permanent redirects to the final page, in the form of: /parent/child.html =
www.domain.com/final.html
Since this method creates alot of extra pages with nothing on them, I also use xml sitemaps, and have excluded all the extra pages that are referenced by the parent/child links.
If you want to see it in action you can view my site:
http://www.phoenixstorks.com/
Notice how when you go to the drop-down portion of the menu bar, the sub-pages DO NOT have the PARENT page in the url link. THAT is what I needed to accomplish, to be able to keep the same menu navigation from my old site design.
Anyway, I hope this might help someone else looking to do the same thing. I really hope that some plugin developer finds a way to make a plugin to simply remove the PARENT from child pages. But until then, this is the method I'll have to use.