What happens when a man who had no childhood - and who never grew up - becomes a father? It doesn't bode well for his children, as this week's scary images of a baby boy dangled by his father over a fourth-floor balcony confirm, writes Shane Hegarty
As an introduction to the strange childhood that most likely awaits Prince Michael II, this week's events in Berlin were a lively start. It was here that his father Michael Jackson dangled the nine-month-old boy over the balcony of his fourth-floor hotel room. The baby kicked his legs, briefly snagging a foot on the rail, as his dad lifted him over with only one arm.
A brief stunt - apparently to humour the small crowd of fans gathered on the street below - it put Michael Jackson's parenting skills on front pages all over the world. That he was in the city to pick up an award honouring his work with children, just added another layer of irony to the latest strange episode in the pop star's life.
That Jackson has a third child at all only emerged in August, six months after Prince Michael II's birth. It was during a visit to a Las Vegas tiger-taming show that the world realised there was a brother to Jackson's five-year-old son, Prince Michael I, and four-year-old daughter, Paris Michael Katherine.
Their daddy, it would seem, is not one for wasting time deciding on baby names. One of the wilder reports had it that, in order to avoid inevitable confusion, Jackson refers to the child as either "The Third" or simply "Number Three".
His brother and sister did not escape publicity either, with Thursday's newspapers splashing photographs of Jackson walking the two children through Berlin Zoo, sporting red veils to protect their anonymity.
As with everything in Jackson's life, the appearance of the child has been quickly followed by rumours. There has been speculation that Prince Michael II is adopted, although People magazine reported that the boy had been conceived "the natural way". The identity of the mother remains a mystery.
The first two children were a result of his now dissolved second marriage to a nurse, Debbie Rowe, although even here there was much discussion as to the exact nature of the conception. Rowe is rumoured to have lived in a separate house to her husband throughout the marriage.
One of the more certain things about Jackson's life is that sacrificing his own childhood to his father's relentless showbusiness ambitions has left the singer so emotionally damaged that his life now seems to be nothing but a freakshow. His three children are steadily becoming supporting players.
Jackson's strict and abusive father, Joseph Jackson, regularly bullied his children as he turned them into a musical phenomenon, the Jackson 5. Daughter LaToya even claims in her autobiography that the girls were sexually assaulted - a claim others in the family have rejected. His relentless infidelities, though, were often carried out in front of his offspring. Michael Jackson has talked of beatings only minutes before going on stage, and of how his father teased him as he went through adolescence. Even into adulthood, a visit from his father was enough to make him physically sick.
Put on the stage at the age of four, his childhood years were dominated by a long, unforgiving work schedule. He didn't go to school, but had three hours of lessons per day with a private tutor, and would then travel to the recording studio where he would record until bedtime.
He told Oprah Winfrey in 1993: "I remember going to the record studio and there was a park across the street and I'd see all the children playing and I would cry because it would make me sad that I would have to work instead". He had no friends other than his brothers, and would sometimes "cry from the loneliness".
"My childhood was completely taken away from me," Michael Jackson told the Oxford Union in 2001. "There was no Christmas, there were no birthdays. It was not a normal childhood, or the normal pleasures of childhood - those were exchanged for hard work, struggle and pain, and eventually material and professional success. But at an awful price. I cannot recreate that part of my life."
And yet he has always sought to do just that, through the company of children. Jackson had been famous for inviting children to stay at his Neverland ranch - with its amusement park rides and miniature zoo - long before the 1993 sexual abuse allegations levelled at him by one boy put an altogether darker edge to this behaviour.
"I compensate for [losing childhood]," he admitted to Oprah Winfrey. "People wonder why I always have children around, because I find the thing that I never had through them, you know Disneyland, amusement parks, arcade games. I adore all that stuff because when I was little, it was always work, work, work."
It would seem, however, that he is doomed to repeat at least some of the mistakes made by his own parents. His children are growing up every bit as isolated as their father did. They don't attend a normal school, but are tutored privately at the Neverland ranch. Jackson's fears of a kidnapping mean that they are under permanent camera surveillance. It is claimed that to compensate for their isolation, they are lavished with gifts, and recently received a tiger cub. Yet when they step out in public, the irony of their father's bizarre attempts to preserve their anonymity is that they find themselves the focus of the world's press.
"Raising children as a famous person is not easy," says Paul Gilligan, chief executive of the ISPCC. "I know that people think that the children and the parents have everything, and there's none of the difficulties that, say, a Traveller couple might have in raising a child. Being famous raises its own set of challenges. They live everyday with the fear of kidnap, for instance, and that can lead to parents passing on their fears to their children, which leads to its own problems. None of that, of course, excuses what he did in Berlin."
It would seem, though, that his fame might be no immunity from the authorities. Reports suggest that, while German police have declined to get involved, child protection officers in the US have asked for a meeting.
"In this kind of situation, supports should be put in place whether they're famous or not," says Paul Gilligan. "If an ordinary person dangled a child from the balcony of a block of flats, you'd have social workers and whatever down there talking to the parents, understanding the situation and offering support."
Both father and children, it would seem, will need all the support they can get. When Michael Jackson was a child, Motown legend Smokey Robinson used to describe him as an old soul in a little body. At Motown Records, they used to call him a "45-year-old midget". Jackson turns 45 next year, still somewhere between adulthood and childhood.
There are other children with parents who attempt to live out a vicarious childhood through their offspring, but there are few who are likely to suffer as much pressure as Prince Michael I, Prince Michael II and Paris Michael. They face a childhood with a father who never had one at all.