Using fiction to smash stereotypes

Published on: 21 March 2025

Author Claire Hatcher-Smith discusses how stories can help children develop awareness of others’ feelings.

In my new series, The Mizzy Mysteries, our detective is a 12-year-old girl with Down Syndrome. No one expects her to be a detective.

As her name suggests, Mizzy Maypole is my tribute to Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s little old lady who defies all expectations with her brilliant sleuthing. Mizzy is nosy, she spots mysteries nobody else has even noticed, and, although she’s terrified of escalators, prone to crashing to conclusions, and constantly underestimated (especially by her older, cooler cousins) she’s determined to show the world she’s actually a very brilliant detective.

So when she finds her great aunt’s long-lost diaries locked in the spare room wardrobe and discovers that instead of dying in her sleep, Great Aunt Jane might actually have been murdered, Mizzy cannot resist investigating.

More than anything, Mizzy’s story was written to smash the stereotypes around what we expect people with Down Syndrome to be like. But Mizzy isn’t just about Down Syndrome.

I hope her investigations will also nudge all of us to look more closely at other people in general – that instead of taking shortcuts and making assumptions, like Mizzy we'll put our detective skills to work, dig a little deeper, and find out who they really are beneath the surface.

Exploring self/other awareness

Alongside writing, I’m also a speech and language therapist. Neurodivergent myself, I’ve unsurprisingly ended up supporting autistic tweens and teens, kids with ADHD and Developmental Language Disorder, as well as young people with Down Syndrome.

Having practised for over 30 years now, approaches and strategies have come and gone and come around again. But, as our awareness of what it means to be neurodivergent has deepened and expanded, the support I really want to give my students increasingly targets self/other awareness. And my approach to this (also unsurprisingly) draws heavily on my other passion – books.

A growing body of research links reading fiction with increased self/other awareness in children, commonly referred to as empathy. Reading about pretend people, with their made-up relationships and fictional adventures, helps real-life children (both neurotypical and neurodivergent) build real-life self-knowledge and empathy skills.

In part, this is because stories expose kids to a wealth of settings and situations, to all sorts of people and relationships and feelings which they might not have come across in their daily lives.

But there’s also the fact that, no matter what your real-life experience, books keep everything safely corralled within the confines of the page, making it less personal, less threatening, more manageable to explore.

Discovering the different forms of empathy

Call me biased, but mysteries are a great – not to mention fun – place to start flexing our empathy muscles through reading. Understanding other people involves a lot of the same processes as detective work. You must look for clues, consider motives, and interview “suspects and witnesses” to find out more.

Most important of all, as Mizzy eventually learns, you must avoid crashing to conclusions. All skills which fit very neatly with the three main types of empathy:

Affective empathy: picking up on what someone else is feeling
Cognitive empathy: considering another person’s perspective
Active empathy: being moved to find out more and/or help

But how do we actually use reading to promote empathy? The joy of it is, not only can you choose any novel or chapter book or picture book which fits with the interests and reading/comprehension levels of your children, but each individual can be supported to dig as deeply into the material as they are able (assuming competency at all times, of course, and never underestimating anyone...)

You probably have a gazillion ideas of your own, but here’s the basic framework I’ve honed over the years. After reading or acting out a scene together, explore the following steps:

Hunt for body language clues and snippets of dialogue which help piece together how the different characters are feeling.
Get super-nosey and wonder what each character’s motives might be for their feelings and words and actions. Then ponder how you might feel and act in the same situation.
Make inferences, deductions and predictions as to what each character might feel and say and do next.
Identify red herrings (perhaps if a character appears to be feeling one way, but acts another, or vice versa).
Collect clues which describe each character’s appearance and personality.
Chat about whether it’s possible to know what the characters are like on the inside by the way they look and act.
Wonder about what people can tell about you, just by looking.
Explore what is different or unsuspected about you that isn’t obvious from your appearance.
Pair up with someone you don’t normally talk to, interview each other and try to find out three things you don’t already know. Then analyse whether what you discovered fits with what you thought you already knew about the other person.
Analyse the main protagonist’s identifying features. What is unique and special about them? Think about what is unique and special about yourself.

This framework is neither exhaustive, nor prescriptive. Take what you like, make it your own and, most importantly, have fun.

The more our children read, the more they investigate and blast through stereotypes, the more – like Mizzy – they’ll learn to never underestimate anyone. And in never underestimating other people, our children might also begin to believe in themselves.

Originally from the UK, Claire Hatcher-Smith now lives on Vancouver Island with her husband, their teenage son and a Korean rescue dog. As well as writing, Claire is a speech and language therapist. Neurodivergent herself, she runs groups for autistic tweens and teens, focusing on self/other awareness, self-esteem and self-advocacy skills.

The Mizzy Mysteries: A Skeleton in the Closet by Claire Hatcher-Smith, illustrated by Yaroslava Apollonova and Lester Magoogan, is out now.