Two recent events have made me realize that I am not the parent I set out to be. One came when I started giving my children gumballs at breakfast. Another hit me when I found myself mentally composing a fervent fan letter to a man who writes gross-out books about a fat, bald superhero named Captain Underpants.

Understand two things about me: I was raised in a strict anti-gum family, and I love fine children's literature. Talk about your deeply held parenting principles: no gum, good books, those are (or were) mine.

Giving in to Gum
So how did I wind out passing out bright purple, red, and green gumballs along with the Healthy Advantage cereal, and joining the Captain Underpants fan club, if only in spirit?

Let;s start with the gumballs. These are, at least, vitamin gumballs. Vitaballs, they;re called, 100 percent of 11 essential vitamins. But don;t go thinking that I snapped them up off the Safeway shelf because I;ve been worn down by a constant battle to get my kids to eat their dark green leafies. No, my kids like their fruits and vegetables. I bought Vitaballs because they are gumballs.

What a difference a decade makes. I started out sure that I wouldn;t ever buy my kids gum. It had a sticky childhood aura of shame, boredom, and vacuous idiocy. "It makes you look like a cow with her cud," my mother would say. Scraping filthy gobs of gum off the bottom of desks was a popular punishment in my elementary school, and I spent quite a bit of time engaged in it.

My "no gum" absolutism started to dissolve when my younger son started occupational therapy as a preschooler. This therapy mystified me. It involved swinging on swings, bouncing on a trampoline, balancing on big balls. But most mystifying of all, it worked wonders for my son, who had a horror of haircuts, socks with bulky seams, and classroom noise. His therapist was passionate about the benefits of chewing for children whose sensory systems weren't up to the demands of their days. She convinced me that it helped many such kids focus better in class, and for those with speech problems, it strengthened their facial muscles. She urged me to have my son chew.

So I turned from gum hater to gum pusher. But, naturally, my son didn't like to chew gum. On the other hand, he's a health nut, and he wants to get his vitamins. So the Vitaballs give him his chewing workout, and his brother is thrilled to have my blessing on his morning gumball.

"Enough!"
And what about my "great books" approach to children's reading? E. Nesbitt's Five Children and It, Edgar Eager's Half Magic, C.S. Lewis' Narnia books, everything by Joan Aiken, Margery Sharpe's Miss Bianca, Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth these are some of the books and writers that had furnished my imaginary universe as a child. I hoped that they and their successors would do the same for my boys.

Well, it seems that in the journey from childhood to motherhood, I'd forgotten a few things. Like how the books I remembered loving had not been devoured one after the other. They'd been leavened by heaping helpings of Nancy Drew, the Black Stallion, and pulpy sci-fi. And I had forgotten how bad some of these beloved books were. Just TRY reading a Black Stallion book out loud. Even some of the classics can be clunky in spots, and I've had some nasty surprises reading an old favorite out loud and choking on a casually racist or sexist assumption. "Dr. Dolittle moments," I call them.

So, as my boys evolved from being happy listeners into independent readers I dropped a lot of my book snobbery. When my older son discovered the Captain Underpants books and devoured the series in short order, I just laughed, and was heartily glad I didn't have to read them too. But my younger son was not an eager reader. He likes logic and rules, and the fuzzy peculiarities of English spelling and pronunciation baffled and sometimes angered him. "Enough! How can they spell ENOUGH like that, do they think I'm crazy?" he yelled one evening while wrestling with his weekly spelling list.

He enjoyed being read to, but while his teachers told me he participated in classroom reading, he showed little interest in reading by himself at home. Until Captain Underpants. He reads and re-reads them. He runs downstairs from his bed—in his underpants, fittingly enough—to share a particularly funny joke. He draws his own Captain Underpants comics. And he's broken through now, taking up Amelia Bedelia and Roald Dahl and Star Wars storybooks. He's launched, thanks to Captain Underpants.

Simply written, crudely drawn, and full of bathroom humor and fantasies based on flouting such childhood oppressors as boring teachers, bossy lunchroom ladies, and control-freak principals, the series has raised the hackles of some parents. As for me, they may be the gumballs of kid lit, but I'm just hoping author Dav Pilkey can write some more of them in a hurry.