Most kids can tell you their mom’s and dad’s names before they start school. It’s one of the first things grown-ups teach them, right along with their own address and phone number.
Prince Jackson’s dad happened to be one of the most famous men on the planet. Fans around the world knew his name by heart.
And Prince had no idea.
He shared this memory as a teenager in “Remembering Michael,” a documentary project about Michael Jackson’s family life. A preview of it came out in December 2013, when Prince was 16.
The project had a very personal producer behind it. Michael’s mother, Katherine Jackson, was its executive producer, and the preview gave fans a rare chance to hear Michael’s children talk about the man they knew at home.
For Prince, that man wasn’t a superstar at first. He was just his dad.
So what was the simple thing that took him so long to figure out?
His dad’s name.
“It took me until I was, like, six years old, to learn that his name was Michael Jackson,” Prince said. “He was always ‘daddy’ to me.”
Think about that for a minute. Six is about the age most kids start first grade. By then, Prince had spent his whole life as Michael’s son, and the name the rest of the world knew so well still hadn’t clicked for him.
There was no big headline moment. While millions of fans around the world screamed Michael’s name, his little boy at home simply called him daddy and never thought twice about it.
These private home videos, dated around 1999 to 2003, catch Michael with little Prince and Paris during the years when he was still simply daddy to them.
Michael at home with little Prince and Paris
There’s a funny twist hiding in this story, too.
Prince’s own birth name is Michael Joseph Jackson Jr. So the little boy who didn’t know his dad’s name was carrying it around the whole time. Once it finally clicked, that may have been a second surprise all its own.
You might think growing up that way would make a kid take things easy. But in the same 2013 documentary preview, Prince made it clear his dad expected a lot from his children.
“He wanted us to always … be greater at it than anybody else had ever been,” Prince said.
That’s a big goal to hand a child. Put it next to the “daddy” memory and you get a picture of two sides of the same father. To the world he was a legend, but at home he was the dad cheering his kids on to do great things.
For those first few years, Prince didn’t need to know anything else about him.
It’s a memory a lot of us can relate to, even if our own fathers never sold a single record. Prince just found out a little later than most kids that the rest of the world had another name for his dad.