forking, waitpid problems in c

Question

For some reason this code executes the parental commands immediately, terminating my semaphores and screwing up my flow control of other programs. Can anyone tell me why the waitpid() isnt working?

    //Create child processes
pid = fork();
if(pid < 0){
    fprintf(stderr, "Fork Failed.\n");
    exit(1);
    return;
}else if(pid==0){
        if(execl("/home/tropix/hw11-2","/home/tropix/hw11-2",semarg,pipe_to_p3,pipe_to_p4,(char*)0)){
            fprintf(stderr, "File Exexecution of hw11-2 failed.\n");
            exit(1);
        }
} else {
    pid = fork();
    if(pid < 0){
        fprintf(stderr, "Fork Failed.\n");
        exit(1);
        return;
    } else if(pid==0){
        if(execl("/home/tropix/hw11-3","/home/tropix/hw11-3",shmarg,semarg,pipe_from_p2,pipe_to_p5_1, (char*)0)){
            fprintf(stderr, "File Execution of hw11-3 failed.\n");
            exit(1);
        }
    } else {
        pid = fork();
        if(pid < 0){
            fprintf(stderr, "Fork Failed.\n");
            exit(1);
            return;
        } else if (pid == 0){
            if(execl("/home/tropix/hw11-4","/home/tropix/hw11-4",shmarg,semarg,pipe_from_p2_2,pipe_to_p5_2, (char*)0)){
                fprintf(stderr, "File Execution of hw11-4 failed.\n");
                exit(1);
            }
        } else {
            pid = fork();
            if(pid < 0){
                fprintf(stderr, "Fork Failed.\n");
                exit(1);
                return;
            } else if (pid == 0){
                if(execl("/home/tropix/hw11-5","/home/tropix/hw11-5",semarg,pipe_from_p3,pipe_from_p4,(char*)0)){
                    fprintf(stderr, "File Execution of hw11-5 failed.\n");
                    exit(1);
                }
            } else if (pid > 0) {
            }
        }

    }

    //Closing Pipes
    close(pipe1[1]);
    close(pipe2[1]);
    close(pipe3[1]);
    close(pipe4[1]);
    close(pipe1[0]);
    close(pipe2[0]);
    close(pipe3[0]);
    close(pipe4[0]);

    //Wait for child process completetion
    waitpid(pid,NULL,0);
    printf("Child Processes Complete.\n");

    //Terminate Semaphores
    semctl(sem_id,0,IPC_RMID);

    //Terminate Shared Memory Segement
    shmctl(shmid, IPC_RMID, NULL);



}

}

Thanks!

EDIT: Ok, I replaced waitpid with:

while (pid = waitpid(-1, NULL, 0)) {
       if (errno == ECHILD) {
          break;
       }
    }

and that got me part of the way there. It isnt executing the parental controls immediately, but it seems to never execute now. As far as the pipe issue you talked about, program 1 (this one) is supposed to terminate all IPC elements, including the pipes. If there is a better way, I would love to hear it.

Thanks @Jonathan