Parenting & Family Quote by Paula Danziger

There is something deliciously self-undercutting about a children’s author admitting she would have needed her own work. Danziger’s line isn’t a victory lap; it’s a quiet origin story. The repetition - “I wish I had had… I do” - reads like someone catching herself mid-sentence, insisting on sincerity because the feeling still stings. That little stammer is the point: it turns a polished author-brand into a recognizable human voice, the kind her readers trusted.

The specific intent is both personal and promotional, but in the least crass way. She’s saying her books were written to fill a gap she remembers vividly: the absence of stories that spoke in a kid’s register about messy feelings, loneliness, divorce, embarrassment, friendship politics. Subtext: childhood is often negotiated with inadequate tools. Adults hand kids rules, not language. Danziger’s fiction famously offered language - funny, sharp, slightly defiant - for experiences kids were already having but weren’t supposed to dramatize.

Context matters because Danziger came up in the 1970s-90s wave of contemporary middle-grade realism, when “kids’ books” stopped pretending childhood was mostly manners and moral lessons. Her wish is also a critique of the shelves she grew up with: too sanitized, too distant, too uninterested in the emotional weather of ordinary kids. The line works because it collapses the gap between author and reader. She isn’t above her audience; she’s standing among them, still haunted by the kid she used to be, writing backward in time to give that kid a handhold.