6 Questions I Still Have For the Youtuber who “rehomed” her son

#6 Why take two COVID-19 relief loans?

One year ago, the youtuber Myka Stauffer and her husband (James Stauffer) posted a video on one of their channels letting the world know they decided to disrupt the adoption of their four-year-old son.

The reaction was immediate and, unlike anything the Stauffers had imagined, backlashed on them. Their video was viewed by millions and it made news all over the world. The response from their fans was a mix of confusion and anger. For everyone else, the Stauffers will forever be the YouTubers who “re-homed” their child.

Myka and James had three youtube channels. James had (and still has) a channel dedicated to car cleaning (The Stauffer Garage). Myka had a personal channel and together they had a family vlog channel. In 2017, Myka and James had three biological children and adopted a child from China. After the adoption, their followers skyrocket. They would have one more child after the adoption, shortly before deciding to disrupt their adoption with their adopted son, H.

Here are a few questions I still have for the Stauffers:

1. Why adopt?

Before making a video where they shared they were going to adopt a child, Myka and James had made no mention of adoption. Therefore, the reason why they decided to adopt in the first place remains somewhat of a mystery.

It seems reasonable to think that being a family vlogger herself, and being ambitious about what she wanted for her channel, Myka followed other family vloggers who were a lot more successful than she was. And a lot of these channels can thank international adoption for their success.

As an example, This gathered nest is a family vlogging channel that Myka mentioned several times. On the five most-watched videos, there are two adoption day videos, a China adoption story, a Congolese adoption story, and a video about siblings meeting their adopted brother for the first time.

Adoption brings in the views, the subscribers, and therefore the money. And not even the Stauffers can deny that H. was responsible for most of the growth for their channels, as James stated in an interview:

When we went to China to adopt our son, H., we had a lot of people from China and from other countries and even our followers here in North America kinda following along with us and they were getting relly wraped up and everybody started getting really excited about it.

As soon as Myka and James started the adoption process, they started making videos about this little boy that, at the time, was not their son yet. They made a total of 27 videos on adoption before actually adopting. They shared a photo and videos of him which, according to an adoption agency is not even allowed:

We don’t advise it. In fact, we ask them specifically not to do it.

After the adoption took place, the channel continued growing and H.'s adoption video would get over 5 million views. The Stauffers bought several cars and an over 600,000 dollar house one year after the adoption.

2. Why not get more knowledge on autism?

When Myka and James adopted H., they went through the process of adopting a special needs child. However, exactly what H.’s special needs were seemed rather confusing. They received information from China that H. could have some brain issues (possibly a cyst). In the US, different doctors gave very different prognoses on his case. One doctor was very optimistic and another discouraged them from adopting.

After H. moved to the USA with the Stauffers, at two and a half years old, it became obvious that he did have special needs. He was diagnosed with autism and it was also determined that he had a stroke in utero. By the end of their time with the Stauffers, he was having numerous and expensive therapies, according to what the couple stated to the police investigation on the case.

After the infamous adoption disruption video, several videos of the Stauffers with H. emerged that raise questions as to how they treated H. One of those videos shows Myka complaining about H.’s constant fits in public when in reality, autistic children tend to have meltdowns related to over-stimulation. In another video, H. is very clearly uncomfortable with having sauce all over him (again, this is explained by him being autistic) and the family is laughing about it.

These things seem like something the parents of an autistic child should know, and would definitively know with only a few hours of research.

3. Would the adoption have happened if there wasn’t a youtube channel?

In 2018, one year after adopting H., Myka posted the following question on a Facebook group about China adoption.

So, Myka and James were clearly looking to adopt another child and their number one concern was adopting a special needs child that looked like a lot of work from the outside (their followers?) but that was actually easy to manage. Honestly, would this couple ever have considered adoption if they didn’t have a youtube channel, and didn’t need to constantly produce new and exciting content?

4. Why think people would forget H. existed?

An interesting fact about the Stauffers adoption disruption video is they didn’t really want to do it in the first place. In retrospect, they were probably right but they also didn't have much of a choice. After H. stopped appearing in their videos and Instagram posts, fans started questioning them about it, and obviously, they deleted every single one of those comments.

It wasn’t until after a lot of pressure from fans, and probably from managers that they decided to make the video. So the question remains, did they actually think people would stop noticing that the children in their videos went from 5 to 4 and not ask questions about it?

5. Why lie after the fact?

After their infamous video, Myka went to Instagram to post a non-apologetic apology in which she states that the couple is not under any sort of investigation. Only a few days later, the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office released the results of their… investigation.

The document revealed that the new adoption process was completely legal but it also painted quite a sad picture of H.’s life with the couple. First of all, the Stauffers complain about how expensive taking care of H. became. This seems ironic considering how much money they made on youtube, because of H. They also didn’t say anything positive above H., only speaking of him in a negative light. They said he had become aggressive and that one of their children was happier now that he was no longer living with them.

The silver lining is that the police were able to confirm H. was living in a healthy and supportive environment which he definitively deserves for the rest of his life.

6. Why take two COVID-19 relief loans?

After the infamous video, the Stauffers deleted their family channel (The Stauffer life) and maintained their two other channels. James is still posting regular content to the Stauffer garage. And Myka’s personal channel is still available on youtube, although she hasn’t uploaded anything since this time last year.

More recently, the Stauffers decided to take two PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) loans. This loan is intended to help businesses that struggled during the pandemic. However, many YouTubers took advantage of the loose rules to get money. James and Myka were no exception and they listed the Stauffer garage as a business with 2 employees that need payment (probably James and Myka themselves). They got a total of 45 thousand dollars in May 2020 and 41 thousand dollars in March 2021.

It doesn’t seem likely they actually needed these loans since there’s no justification for their channel (Stauffer garage) to struggle during the pandemic, considering people are spending more time at home watching youtube. However, their channels obviously struggled because they disrupted the adoption and lost a lot of followers, sponsors, and income (and not because of COVID-19).

You might think that after deleting their family channel, all the videos of H. were deleted from their channels, but unfortunately, Myka’s channel still has a lot of videos with him. I’m guessing Myka still wants to profit from the views, and possibly even considers going back to youtube at some point. These two are the only possible explanations for her to maintain her channel after losing all her sponsors.

Overall, it’s a really sad history and the only good thing that came out of it is H. seems to be in a much better family now.

I also want to state that I understand adoptions don’t always work out in the way parents want them to. However, this case is not just a failed adoption case. Ultimately, it’s a case that makes us face the question:

How far is someone willing to go for social media fame and money?

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