The circled portion of the JavaFX 2.1 API documentation for Pane shows that this control (and controls inheriting from it such as VBox) have children as the component’s default property.

JavaFX isn't hard to learn, and with the right IDE and a complete JavaFX tutorial to teach the core concepts, you'll be an expert in no time.

Ready to develop modern, feature-rich GUI applications? Here are some reasons why now is a great time to start using JavaFX instead of Swing.