Removing Child Elements

The problem is that I'm creating child elements based on an xml document served from a php script. However everytime it is served I'm just appending all the elements to the end of the child list creating copies. So I decided to just remove all the children each time.. But this doesn't seem to be working.

function remove_shouts(){
var shoutbox_div = document.getElementById('shouts');
var shouts = shoutbox_div.childNodes;
for(var i = 0; i < shouts.length; i++){
shoutbox_div.removeChild(shouts.item(i));
}
}