MYKA and James Stauffer’s decision to rehome their adopted son, Huxley, after sharing his journey with millions of followers, sparked outrage and raised serious ethical questions about exploiting children for online fame.
Fabulous investigates the dark side of family vlogging.
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YouTuber Myka Stauffer wiped her eyes, gripped her husband James’ hand and gazed into the camera.
“There’s not an ounce of our body that doesn’t love Huxley with all of our being,” she said, her voice cracking.
“[But] after multiple assessments, after multiple evaluations, numerous medical professionals felt that he needed a different fit [for] his medical needs.
“He needed more.”
In the seven-minute video uploaded in May 2020, the couple from Ohio, USA, wept as they went on to explain how the four-year-old autistic boy they’d adopted from China three years earlier had turned out to have more complex care needs than they’d anticipated.
Myka and James told the 700,000 subscribers of their YouTube channel, The Stauffer Life, that they’d made the difficult decision to place Huxley with a new “forever family”.
In other words, they’d given away their adopted child.
Brutal backlash
The backlash was brutal.
Followers had emotionally invested in the family’s adoption journey, and Huxley had featured in 27 vlogs, helping to propel the family to social media stardom and lucrative brand deals.
Now, their audience felt duped, and furiously accused them of ripping Huxley from his home country and adopting him solely for “views”, before “dumping him” when his care proved difficult.
Myka’s denial and apologies did nothing to dampen the furore and, within days, the family had lost thousands of followers and their endorsement deals.
The Stauffer Life channel was deleted and Myka vanished from the internet.
Five years on, the scandal is the subject of new HBO documentary An Update On Our Family, named after the title of the Stauffer’s now-infamous tearful video announcement.
“It seemed really obvious that this was an unthinkably horrible, terrible, bad thing these people did,” says documentary maker and director Rachel Mason, from Los Angeles.
“But there was just so much more to it that I felt we didn’t get by simply looking at it in that way.”
There’s a lot of intense criticism in the world of mum bloggers
Myka, 37, and James, 39, who have four other children, now aged five to 14, did not respond to Rachel’s requests for an interview.
The three-part series, available on Sky in the UK, is woven from the Stauffers’ online content, with commentary from vloggers, experts and former subscribers.
Rachel, 47, explains: “There was this image of perfection that Myka herself was putting out, which I think is a super-dangerous place to be in.
“In the world of mum bloggers, there’s a lot of intense criticism, so if you’re saying: ‘I’m the best and I hit this high standard,’ you are setting yourself up to fail. And the fallout here was intense.”
Myka, a nurse, was a single mum when she began vlogging in 2012, having left her fiancé and father of her baby daughter Kova.
Early vlogs centred on life as a working mum and her weight-loss tips.
Around that time, she met car dealer James Stauffer via OkCupid, and he proposed to her in Times Square, New York, eight months after they met.
Thousands of subscribers
The pair welcomed daughter Jaka in 2013, before marrying in 2014.
Around that time, the couple launched their shared YouTube channel, The Stauffer Life.
While Myka posted about all sorts of topics, including domestic life and cleaning tips, it was content about her growing family that attracted the most attention.
Over the next few years, she documented her attempts to conceive, her 2014 positive pregnancy test and subsequent miscarriage.
The An Update On Our Family documentary explores how the couple kept followers hooked with pregnancy updates, vlogs about the arrival of son Radley in 2015 and the chaos of raising kids, as brands such as Mattel lined up to work with them.
“If you look at everybody that is successful within [family vlogging], they have the same things that Myka had – a bubbly personality, good looks, a nice house,” Rachel says.
By late 2015, the channel had thousands of subscribers and Myka had quit her job in nursing to focus on YouTube full-time.
Followers began noticing Huxley wasn’t featured on the channel
The Stauffers announced in 2016 that they were in the process of adopting a boy from China through the now-closed adoption agency WACAP.
The couple added that they were even considering adopting another child from Uganda or Ethiopia once this adoption went through.
In the months that followed, the Stauffers chronicled the process, from announcing the new name they’d chosen for the 18-month-old – Huxley – to revealing the first photo of him.
They also described how their adopted son had special needs, due to what the agency described as a “brain tumour” and “brain damage”.
In one YouTube video, Myka told viewers: “My child is not returnable,” and they would love the youngster “no matter what state” he was in when he came to them.
Subscribers became invested in the process, requesting constant updates as the Stauffers travelled to China to meet Huxley in 2017.
That meeting was documented in a clip titled Huxley’s Emotional Adoption Video Gotcha Day China Adoption.
The widely used phrase “gotcha day” has since been criticised by the adoption community, claiming it commodifies the child.
The video – in which a visibly distressed Huxley, then two, could be seen crying – was viewed 5.7 million times.
When they returned to Ohio, the Stauffers shared updates about Huxley’s integration with their other children and posted heartwarming videos of his birthdays and Christmases.
They also touched on the challenges they faced, such as Huxley having struggled with leaving his foster mum in China.
In an article for US publication Parade, Myka wrote that Huxley’s file had been “inaccurate”.
In fact, she wrote, he “[had] a stroke in utero, has level three autism, and sensory processing disorder.”
She described him as a “great kid” who required “patience”.
Meanwhile, her YouTube subscribers doubled between 2017 and 2018.
She acquired partnerships with brands including Glossier and Fabletics.
Some of her Huxley update videos, like 5 Things I Didn’t Expect About Our China Adoption! International Adoption, were sponsored by companies such as laundry detergent brand Dreft.
In February 2020, Myka discussed the difficulties of caring for a child with complex needs, writing: “We have hard days, lots of them.
“I wish autism and adoption trauma had a manual to direct you through it all.”
Huxley absent from updates
That Mother’s Day, she shared that it had been “the hardest” holiday she’d ever had.
Followers began noticing that Huxley, then four, no longer featured on The Stauffer Life, and they demanded updates – only for such comments to be deleted, fuelling further questions.
In May 2020, the couple posted the now infamous clip An Update On Our Family, in which they revealed that Huxley had been placed in a more suitable home.
It showed a tearful Myka, saying: “Do I feel like a failure as a mom? Like, 500%,” and: “We are going to be heartbroken for a very long time.”
They were being pilloried online for exploiting a special-needs child
Amid the backlash, local police received multiple reports of concern about Huxley’s safety.
Delaware County Sheriff’s Office conducted a welfare check and reported he was safe and looked after in his new home.
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In the meantime, the Stauffers were being pilloried online.
A petition demanding that they remove monetised YouTube videos “exploiting a special-needs child” attracted more than 150,000 signatures.
On social media, people began sleuthing through old content – such as a 2018 video in which Myka discussed switching Huxley’s $500-a-month speech therapist to a cheaper one – while wearing a Cartier bracelet reportedly worth more than $6,000.
The couple were also criticised for fitting Huxley with a thumb guard and appearing to bind his thumb with duct tape to stop him sucking it.
They received death threats and, one by one, their lucrative brand partnerships fell away.
In a written statement in June 2020, Myka denied she and James had adopted Huxley “to gain wealth”.
Posting on Instagram, she apologised for the “pain” she had caused and wrote: “While we did receive a small portion of money from videos featuring Huxley and his journey, every penny and much more went back into his care.”
Dark side of family vlogging
When it came to making the documentary, the Stauffers were the first people Rachel contacted.
They did not respond, though, which Rachel believes is a form of self-protection.
“They’re probably deeply traumatised by media attention at this point,” she says.
She admits she grappled with the ethics of bringing fresh attention to their story without “re-traumatising” those involved, especially the children, and she chose to represent Huxley by an animation in the documentary, rather than show his face.
“I felt like, if this series can open up a dialogue [about adoption and vlogging], then at least it would allow some kind of reasoning to justify re-opening the trauma for the family,” she says.
It’s not just the Stauffers’ story that has exposed the dark side of family vlogging.
American mumfluencer Ruby Franke was arrested in 2023 after her malnourished 12-year-old son escaped home by climbing out of a window.
Last year, she and her business partner Jodi Hildebrandt were sentenced to at least four years in prison for child abuse.
Franke’s daughter Shari, 21, who has recently published a memoir about her ordeal, is urging people to stop watching family vlogs, arguing that they are exploitative.
“I don’t understand why people like to watch it. I think it’s strange,” she has said.
‘It’s chilling to even have to ask if someone adopted a kid for views’
Meanwhile, in 2021, mum-of-one Jordan Cheyenne, who had 500k subscribers, apologised after a video showed her coaching her nine-year-old son to pose for the camera as he cried about their sick dog.
She took a five-month hiatus from YouTube and has since told followers how she’s made a “conscious effort” to remove her son from her videos.
Rachel says she found many examples of “what looked to be extraordinary incidents of child abuse” while researching the world of family vlogs.
“It was absolutely horrifying to see these things play out in the world of entertainment,” she says.
“We came across a video where a guy pulled a gun on his kid for the views.
“You’re watching this, thinking: ‘How far is this going?’”
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Myka Stauffer has not posted online since 2020, though James continues to share car videos on his channel Stauffer Garage, which has 1 million YouTube subscribers.
It is unclear whether the couple are still together.
Rachel admits she would be “fascinated to hear what they have to say” about her documentary.
She hopes the series sparks discussions about regulation to protect children of family vloggers.
“When you start asking questions, and you have people like Shari Franke reveal what their real experience has been, you have to really look at the apps and ask: ‘What are we doing?’”
Huxley’s new family is understood to have formally adopted and re-named him, and after more than two years of his day-to-day life, medical history and disabilities being documented and monetised, he is no longer in the public eye.
As for the question of whether the Stauffers adopted Huxley to increase their fame, Rachel says: “It is not for me to determine.
“I almost wanted that to be the central question of the series.
“It is chilling for everyone to think about, because it expands it to a larger societal question.
“How could we be in a situation where we would even be asking: ‘Did someone adopt a kid for views?’
“I’m not sure that we really want to know the answer.”
- Watch An Update On Our Family on Sky Documentaries now.
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