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’re probably thinking about the Titanic.
Last fall, Osiris, age 5, told his mother, 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. (He found it delicious.) Since first hearing the story of the Titanic, Ozzy, as he’s 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 5,500 miles 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 around 2:20 a.m. the next day, it remains a source of fascination for many children. The children 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 5. After many frustrating bath time re-enactments involving flimsy ship models, Matheson and his father, 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 Debbie Sorensen, a clinical psychologist with a Ph.D. in development psychology. The more children learn about the ship, the more there is to investigate. Such hyper-focus on historical events like the Titanic is common among neurodivergent and neurotypical children alike, Dr. Sorensen said.
What presents as morbid curiosity to death-averse adults can provide a sense of transcendence for a young mind, she added. “Picturing those people who died, picturing the ship cracking and falling down to the bottom of the ocean, it taps into a sense of awe,” she said. (For the same reason, Sept. 11, tsunamis and other large-scale disasters often become a topic of interest for children, she said.)
Ana Sofia Ribeiro, a research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, has studied resilience to natural disasters and eco-anxiety in children. Compared with these, the Titanic is “a disaster that you get to play with,” she said, a romantic fantasy within which children can explore death at a distance.
Stephen Shore, Ed.D., an associate clinical professor of special education at Adelphi University, said encyclopedic knowledge of a topic defined what was referred to as a “special interest area” for autistic or neurodivergent children. Subjects with a deep well of facts to learn — like the one provided by the Titanic — provide “a sense of order to a fairly unpredictable social world for autistic and otherwise neurodivergent individuals.”
An unsinkable interest
Titanic kids — and often by extension, their parents — know all about the sister ships, the R.M.S. Olympic and the H.M.H.S. Britannic; the rescue of the surviving passengers by the R.M.S. Carpathia; and the classes of passengers (first, second and third). They know which of the four funnels was merely decorative (the ship had only three main engines) and the temperature of the water the ship sank into (about 28 degrees Fahrenheit).
They are also quick to explain the reasons the ship met its end.
“Where do you want me to start — 11:40 or … ?” asked Ryley, 12, in Los Angeles, who has memorized the events post-collision (which occurred around 11:40 p.m.), and pointed out the structural flaws in the rivets. He can also speak on the reported tiff between radio operators on the S.S. Californian and the Titanic.
In Manhattan, Charlotte, 13, who built a nearly 10,000-piece Titanic Lego set by herself over six months, flagged a lack of binoculars among the lookouts, as well as the hard turn that caused a larger gash to the ship’s starboard hull that may have resulted from hitting the iceberg head-on, she said.
Back in Spring, Matheson knows the exact position of the 20 lifeboats on the Titanic — far too few to service the people aboard.
And sometimes, of course, dressing up is the best means of obsession expression: Lucas, a 13-year-old in Pittsburgh, recently dressed as the ship’s captain, Edward Smith, for his school’s career day. Eleven-year-old Ned in Sydney, Australia, loves the Titanic so much that he dressed as the sinking ship for his school’s book week parade in 2022.
John Zaller, the executive producer of Exhibition Hub, the company that designed “Bodies: The Exhibition” and “Titanic: An Immersive Voyage,” a traveling exhibition with interactive elements, attested that Titanic kids often knew more than their tour guides. At the Titanic experience, children can sit in a lifeboat and watch a simulation of the ship sinking, see a life-size model of the boiler room be flooded with water, and follow along with the passengers on their boarding pass, ultimately finding out whether they survived the wreck.
“The biggest takeaway for kids is, ‘I lived!’ or ‘I died!’” Mr. Zaller said. “They understand the power of that.”
Madeline Donahue, an artist based in Brooklyn, has two children, now 6 and 8, who became obsessed with the disaster after finding a book about it on a shelf in their house. A rendering of the Titanic toy ever-present in her house looms in two of her paintings, representing “the awareness of death” she has as a mother and the knowledge that parents do not control fate.
“We can think about this tragedy in a way that, first of all, has been commercialized, and, second of all, references an age of playfulness,” she said, adding that she does not shy away from discussing death with her children.
The work of children is to comprehend a world that existed long before them, as Dr. Sorensen explained, and the Titanic allows them something to clamber aboard as they sort the facts from myth, the real funnels from the fake.
As Titanic kids move on to, or zigzag between, other things — like “Hamilton” or the Roman Empire — there is always someone just setting out on the journey.
In St. Louis, Mo., Titanic enthusiast Teddy, age 5, wanted to tell me all about the ship, but first, said he had something to share, even if I couldn’t see it over the phone: “Wait, let me get my iceberg!”
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