Popular YouTubers Myka and James Stauffer said they would love their adopted son unconditionally. So why did they give him away?
The Stauffers’ adopted son, Huxley, had been a focal point of their YouTube and Instagram pages until this spring, when he suddenly stopped appearing in videos. Photo: Myka Stauffer/Instagram This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
Before she was Myka Stauffer, adoption vlogger, she was Myka Bellisari, a nurse and single mother living in Ohio, posting weight-loss videos to her YouTube channel. This was 2012, around the time she met James on OkCupid. After they moved in together in Indianapolis and got pregnant, the couple started The Stauffer Life, where they vlogged about their relationship and growing family. In 2014, they were married, and Myka began a channel using her new last name.
From left: The Stauffers’ YouTubed Life: January 3, 2015: Myka posts a positive pregnancy test. The Stauffers’ early hits focus on their efforts to grow their family.February 17, 2016: Family-routine videos, like this one on bedtime, draw viewers further into their personal lives From top: The Stauffers’ YouTubed Life: January 3, 2015: Myka posts a positive pregnancy test. The Stauffers’ early hits focus on their efforts to gro...
During their search, Myka became active on Facebook groups about adoption. Cynthia Martin, a clinical psychologist who specializes in autism spectrum disorder and is the mother of two adopted daughters from China, says she first encountered Myka in a group specific to parents who either had adopted from China or were interested in doing so. She says Myka “was very vocal” within the group and had reached out to her to ask about various special conditions. Myka also talked about her vlog.
In October 2017, Myka and James, along with their three biological children, traveled to China to pick up Huxley. The accompanying video, which they called Huxley’s “Gotcha Day” — a term popular on YouTube but criticized by the adoption community — racked up more than 5.5 million views.
In the first year with Huxley, Myka’s channel grew to over 400,000 subscribers, and her brand expanded from family-and-lifestyle vlogger to special-needs-adoption advocate. She started using hashtags popular within the adoption community — and sometimes misused them.
As the couple’s YouTube profiles grew, so did their lifestyle. In 2018, the Stauffers bought a home in an upscale suburb of Columbus for $670,000, one with multiple fireplaces, a finished basement with a bar, and a great room with a 20-foot ceiling. A Range Rover and Mercedes began showing up in videos.
James told viewers there were a lot of challenges they didn’t share on the vlog and that, in China, they’d been told Huxley knew the alphabet and said multiple words already in his native language. “None of that was true,” James said. He added they’d “struggled to vlog” because of their son’s behaviors.
The sheriff’s-office report later revealed the extent of the Stauffers’ struggles. It detailed how the couple had hired a full-time caregiver for Huxley — which was “very expensive” — to prevent what authorities say one of the Stauffers described as the child’s “severe aggression” toward their other children.
Offline that spring, the Stauffers were talking with medical experts and therapists, conversations that would lead them to the possibility of finding a new home for their son. That was never part of the “journey” they had expected to experience, much less share.
Later on Instagram, Myka apologized for “being so naïve” when she’d started the adoption process. “I was not selective or fully equipped or prepared. I received one day of watching at home online video training,” she wrote. Several women have, in recent years, spoken out about dissolving their child’s adoption. Most have faced similar online attacks, including a woman I’ll call Lauren, who ended her son’s adoption after he was diagnosed with a severe medical condition. In her case, she hadn’t agreed to adopt a special-needs child; not until she brought her son home and he began missing key developmental milestones did his medical condition become clear.
Lauren initially decided to speak publicly about her experience to help other adoptive parents who might be struggling and to encourage them to get support. Though she received some compassionate messages, the insults drowned them out. Most of the cruelest comments were from women. “I think fear is behind the hatred,” she says. “Those women — and it will be women — they don’t want to admit that they would have crumbled. They feel like they would have had the mental willpower to have coped.
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