NEW YORK – Parents often look down at the whorl on the top of their children’s heads and wonder what, exactly, is going on inside.

An industry of books, video games, films, merchandise and museums offers some insight: They are probably thinking about the Titanic.

In autumn 2024, Osiris, five, told his mother, Ms Tara Smyth, that he wanted to eat the Titanic for dinner. So she prepared a platter of baked potatoes – each with four hot-dog funnels, or smokestacks – sitting on a sea of baked beans.

Since first hearing the story of the Titanic, Ozzy, as he is known, has amassed a raft of factoids, a Titanic snow globe from the Titanic Belfast museum and many ship models at his home in Hastings, England.

About 8,850km away in Los Angeles, Mia and Laila, 15-year-old twins, devote hours every week to playing Escape Titanic on Roblox. They have been doing this for the last several years.

Sometimes, they go down with the ship on purpose – “life is boring”, explained Mia, “and the appeal is that it’s kind of dramatic”.

Nearly 113 years after the doomed White Star Line steamship collided with an iceberg on April 14, 1912, and sank at about 2.20am the next day, it remains a source of fascination for many children.

The ones The New York Times spoke to did not flinch at the mortal fact at the heart of the story: That of the more than 2,200 passengers on the Titanic, more than twice as many passengers died as those who survived.

“I really like whenever it just cracked open in half and then sank and then just fell apart into the Atlantic Ocean,” said Matheson, 10, from Spring, Texas, who has loved the story since he read I Survived The Sinking Of The Titanic, 1912 at age five.

After many frustrating bath time re-enactments involving flimsy ship models, Matheson and his father, Mr Christopher Multop, designed a Tubtastic Titanic bath toy – of which they say they now sell about 200 a month (separate floating iceberg included).

But why?

The Titanic presents a perfect fact pile for children as they grapple with big concepts like death, said clinical psychologist Debbie Sorensen, who has a doctorate in development psychology.

The more children learn about the ship, the more there is to investigate. Such hyperfocus on historical events like the Titanic is common among neurodivergent and neurotypical children alike, she added.

What presents as morbid curiosity to death-averse adults can provide a sense of transcende...