myka stauffer, myka stauffer adoption, myka stauffer huxley
Influencers

YouTubers “Rehome” Autistic Adopted Son After Monetizing Videos About Him For Years

Myka Stauffer is a YouTuber and social media moneymaker who has become a poster woman for an unfortunately big issue in our time: using children to promote your brand. There are a lot of mommy and daddy bloggers out there who make cash off of brand synergy and monetized videos and posts, in which they use their kids as talking points. If they were just talking about them, that might be more understandable, but videotaping and airing a child’s entire development has become totally normalized. Stauffer is just even more egregiously bad than most.

Stauffer and her husband James adopted a child from China in 2017, who they named Huxley. Huxley was already close to three years old when he was adopted, according to Buzzfeed News. The Stauffers began sharing parts of their life in 2014, but Huxley’s adoption drew far more attention to their lives, and the lives of their four other children, all biological.

Myka’s personal channel has 717,000 subscribers, and the family’s channel, called The Stauffer Life, has 332,000. Altogether, they published about 27 videos on the process of adopting Huxley and solicited money from viewers for unspecified costs.

Huxley has special needs which, Myka wrote in an article for Parade, wasn’t his adopted parents ideal.

 

 
 
 
 
 
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“But as we let the idea soak in, God softened our hearts,” she wrote. “Before we knew it, we were open to almost every special needs in the book.”

The Stauffers eventually shared that Huxley was diagnosed with autism. Over the next few years, he still appeared in videos and posts on Instagram. Then, he disappeared.

myka stauffer, myka stauffer adoption, myka stauffer huxley
via Instagram/@mykastauffer

Fans wanted to know where Huxley went. Some were even concerned about his safety. Instagram accounts like @MykaStaufferFan began pressuring the Stauffers to address where Huxley had gone, thinking that they would have to, if the issue drew enough public attention.

 

 
 
 
 
 
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On Tuesday, they posted a video titled, “an update on our family.” There they shared that they had found another home for Huxley, believing they could not meet his needs, and saying “multiple scary things” had happened towards the other kids in the house. They introduced him to another family who has been trained to deal with special needs children, saying Huxley wanted to be with them.

“We saw that in family time with other people, he constantly choose [sic] them and signed and showed tons of emotion to show us and let us know he wanted this,” Myka wrote.

While it definitely is better for Huxley to be with a family that can and will take proper care of him, people do not think the Stauffers should be getting off so easy for their exploitation of Huxley, nor making money off videos featuring him any longer:

This is a case of a child being used for social media clout and cash in a particularly obvious way. But Where is the line with any child? And what kind of justice can be found for Huxley himself? Should any child have a parent making these decisions about their privacy before they’re of an age to consent? 

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Aimeé Lutkin