Myka & James Stauffer and their children aka content

[Music] hey guys what's up and welcome back to my channel so it's funny because the first time I wore this wig I was raging about Amber Heard and in this video I'm gonna be preaching about something else so maybe we should just call this one the rage wig just kidding every way of mine is a rage wig this is gonna be a chapter two video I'm in a time stamp every single chapter down below so if you already know what's going on and you won't kind of want to skip me summarizing it you can do that so what's gonna happen is I'm gonna summarize this I'm then going to go into more details that the media might not have included like video footage like proof of certain behaviors and then I will go into analysis so that's what you're in for that's the [ __ ] menu a youtuber placed her autistic adopted son from China with a new family after making content with him for years mica Stauffer built her YouTube following partly by sharing every step of her journey to adopt a toddler from China this week she revealed why he'd gone missing from her videos a youtuber with hundreds of thousands of followers who has shared her family's experience of adopting a toddler from China announced on Tuesday that she and her husband had permanently placed their child with another family after unspecified behavioral issues the announcement has caused a firestorm on social media and within the creator and influencer communities many are questioning the ethics of the youtuber Micah Stauffer after she spent years sharing intimate details of her son Huxley's life on a monetized Channel even before her family adopted Huxley in 2017 Mike had made his story a key theme on her channel which has exploded in popularity and landed her several high-profile sponsorships she has also positioned herself as an advocate for international adoption at several national news outlets these facts coupled with long simmering debate about the right of children on social media has led to an outcry against the couple and the decision to publicize and monetize their lives I'm gonna pause here for a second so the channel is under my cast offers name that channel has about 700,000 subscribers understandably she's lost quite a few since they put out their video saying that they rehomed their child they also have a family I don't think there's anything on it as of right now can we just stop a second and acknowledge like this is something that might seem petty and stupid there are two parents here there's Micah and then there's James so like I know that everyone here is like screaming about Micah but it's like I would want to scream about them both in Parenthood it should be 50/50 now of course they're gonna be off days where someone's 80 and the other ones 20 but the bottom line is you're both parents and you're both making the decisions so as much as I don't like Micah's decisions I also don't like James so I think it's important to remember that there are two people here that are on the receiving end of the heat or that should be anyway the couples attorneys Thomas 10f and Taylor sayers said in a statement to BuzzFeed news that Huxley had not been placed in the foster system but rather they had decided to quote and select a family who is equipped to handle Huxley's needs we are privy to this case and given the facts at hand we feel this was the best decision for Huxley the attorneys said in their statement and coming to know our clients we know they are a loving family and very caring parents that would do anything for their children since his adoption they consulted with multiple professionals in the health care and educational arenas in order to provide Huxley with the best possible treatment and care over time and the team of medical professional advise our client it might be best for Huxley to be placed with another family this is devastating news for any parent I want to just say remember this part about the medical professionals because I have some video footage that goes a little bit against this narrative but okay Mike and her husband James who live in Ohio have been sharing their life on YouTube since 2014 Micah's channel has seven hundred and seventeen thousand subscribers last I checked is actually seven hundred and ten thousand and to the family's channel the Stoffer life has three hundred and thirty-two thousand when the couple started vlogging they had one daughter together and Micah had a daughter from a previous relationship they have since had two sons together whose pregnancy and birth they also shared on their channel in July 2016 the couple posted a video titled big announcement baby number four in the video they announced that they were aiming to adopt a little boy from China they added they were even considering adopting another child from quote Uganda or Ethiopia once this adoption went through so I also want you to keep in mind China Uganda and Ethiopia they are all important things that I will refer to later mica produced 27 videos about their adoption journey including a 13-part series of adoption updates in the series maika answered questions about the process of adopting from China and emotions she felt in some videos mica plugged a fundraiser she had organized for a Huxley's unspecified needs she said every person who donated five dollars would unlock a different piece of a thousand-piece puzzle which would at the end be a photo of Huxley that she would reveal to the world she also said she would write the names of all the donors in his baby book in a sponsored video from 2017 mica said she was using her proceeds from YouTube ads towards her adoption writing in the caption that the sponsorship profits are going towards bringing our son home from China an article she wrote for parade mica said the stuffers were told by the agency Huxley had a brain tumor and brain damage she wrote that at first the couple weren't open to a special needs adoption to be noted I'm reading the article as it is written so the term special needs I've read a euphemism that isn't super appreciated it's so just a note but as we let the idea soak in God has softened our hearts she wrote before we knew it we were open to almost every special needs in the book in October 2017 mica posted a compilation video titled Huxley's emotional adoption video gotcha day China adoption that she dedicated to all the orphans around the world featured videos of Huxley before his adoption as well as a video of the family traveling to China and meeting him for the first time Huxley was two and a half years old at the time this video was a huge hit for Micah's channel and has been viewed more than 5.5 million times then on Tuesday night the staffers posted a video called an update on our family then removed Huxley from their home and placed him with another family they said the couple said the decision was made for Huxley's emotional well-being James said Huxley had several special needs that they weren't aware of until he came home to the US they had placed him an intense therapy over the past year he said and consulted experts that's basically the gist so there were several things that came off as warnings to me now obviously this is high insight because I didn't know this was gonna happen before it happened I didn't know they were gonna give up their child but when you look back on certain parts of their content there are certain things that would make you raise your eyebrow to say the least one of the things that was noted was that all screenshots are alleged okay so allegedly there are screenshots from facebook where Micah was asking a question about adoption and other things so let's just look at those screenshots and you can make up your mind on whether these things sound normal to you or not so there is one screenshot that says we are on the journey to adopt and we are hoping to bring home two little boys with a special focus I can't wait to see what the Lord has planned for our family we are very open to a bunch of different special focuses God is good now I looked in to what exactly special focus refers to because at first I was like is this a weird of terminology for children with disability based on a website I found it says that the CWC which stands for China waiting child a special focus program is a program designed to assist children whose files have been on the online a CWC list for over two months that's one part of it but it also says as long as at least one of the children is designated as special focused child families who are eligible to adopt from China are permitted to adopt two children within one year either simultaneously or successively so when Micah was asking about the special focus program it seems to me that part of it was so that they could adopt either two children together or close to each other rather than have to wait years for them to be a part which in and of itself is not inherently wrong but it becomes suspicious as time goes on just something noted so it isn't clear to me whether special focus children have any disability or if it really just is because of the time they've been on the database I just wonder about the terminology special focus because in a way I'm like yeah that makes sense because we're focusing on someone who's been on the website for longer you know to you make sure that they find their family but special focus could also seem to refer to disability because like we now know she did adopt a child Huxley who has autism amongst potentially other things though that's a little up in the air in and of itself another Facebook posts that Mike put on the China adoption questions read we're praying about adopting again and my husband wanted me to ask what special needs would you consider minor or relatively easy to manage that most people wouldn't consider easy while I understand the sentiment of this question could be benevolent it also kind of just reminds me of like someone talking about pets kind of like when you get snakes and you ask someone hey what's like a good beginner type of snake and people will say ball python or corn snake it kind of feels like this is an equivalent which is weird to think about with a human asking on the Chyna adoption questions page sure but you're really gonna be getting anecdotal information like I feel like this would be a question you'd ask a medical professional to just ask what the difference is between multiple disabilities and then you can see what you can handle and what you as a parent are prepared to do and you know like what's within your means it could be benevolent I guess I just find it strange remember how what I read said that over time the team of medical professional advised our clients it might be best for Huxley to be placed with another family interesting because there's this video that was posted before officially picking up Huxley so this is when the adoption process was still ongoing and Micah was talking to medical professionals about the diagnosis and prognosis that Huxley was getting because apart from the autism she was getting conflicting information about what disabilities he officially confirmed did have the neurologist and the physicians in China they're very confident in the diagnosis that they gave us and we were a hundred percent confident and we were a hundred percent prepared for that diagnosis we prepared the good the bad you know just really preparing for all of you know everything that it could encompass and we sent off our imaging to our physician that's kind of an honorable on board with Huxley she's been reviewing the file she's been very optimistic about this little boy she's like I don't see anything wrong with him he looks perfect to me and then when she not the imaging her optimism went down significantly she and it's nothing against this physician you know she's just listening to what other doctors other neurosurgeons and neuro development specialists are her but her prognosis and everything for our son just went drastic she kind of almost discouraged us from adopting him like saying that this is going to be severe this is going to be a lot you know we don't know what unknown elements could be and for us it was hard it was hard to hear somebody say that but for me more than anything I go from one diagnosis to a totally different diagnosis but immediately when she gave me another diagnosis I looked at the bright side I was like you know that could be awesome there could be so many good things about that second diagnosis and we asked for a couple more videos from the foster mama that is taking care of our little boy right now and she provided them and if anything my child is not returnable I so when I heard all of the things that that doctor was telling us it kind of went in one ear and out the other I wasn't in a state of denial I accepted and took on everything that she said and I sat down with Jim I said do you know we're asking situation if our little boy at one point in his life he needs to be in a wheelchair and he needed full-on care would you still love him and we without a doubt in our minds we knew no matter what to state he came to us that we would love him using the term in one ear out the other right before saying oh but I wasn't in denial it's a bad choice of words to use in one ear out the other if you really want to say that you considered something and that you truly evaluated it to every single extent that you can especially because we are talking about a child here you're not just buying a [ __ ] teapot from this clip in my opinion it seems like disability wasn't taken seriously and that's not me saying don't ever adopt a child with disabilities what I am saying is don't treat them like quirks but personality quirks like give them the right amount of respect where you really need to think about how does this disability affect them how does it affect you in the sense of can you provide everything they need emotionally financially and what other other support system they are you prepared to do you feel like it's within your realm of capabilities because for some people it's not and that's fine but you need to address that and on top of that not only you in terms of mica but also the husband because again they're both the parents so it's a question of as a team can you do what you need to do I don't know how seriously they took what they were being told especially when the medical professionals themselves said that it was severe or that things could get worse and that's with any child with disabilities or without things can happen that you will not predict and ideally when you have a child or when you adopt a child you're signing up to take care of them no matter what so then once they did get Huxley and Huxley was officially living with them there was a video and I'm gonna just show you a screenshot because I don't want to show Huxley's face or any of the children's faces you could see that there was duct tape put on his hand because apparently there was an issue with him sucking his thumb there's also proof that other children within the family were sucking their thumbs and they didn't have duct tape so I'm just gonna leave that there I don't know if maybe off-camera even the other children had duct tape on their hands as a solution to sucking on their thumbs but to me that seemed extremely extremely suspicious so first of all I think that Huxley was a very strategic decision now this might be me being cynical I don't know how to be anything else so so I think Huxley was treated as a product by them they chose a child that was from China which inherently is there a problem with that absolutely not but going back to the article remember how they also said they wanted it to also adopt a child from Ethiopia or Uganda to me it's a little bit suspicious when people have a very particular fixation with adopting a child from elsewhere specifically when that child will stand out in the sense of all her other children are white or white passing as far as I know and Huxley would stand out as different which isn't a bad thing normally but if your sole reason for adopting a child from a specific country is so that you can turn that into a selling point for your channel then your fetishizing the fact that you have a Chinese child so it has nothing really to do with the well-being of the child as much as this will be new and different for my channel aside from that I also think that there's the commodification of disability because in the trajectory the journey that we have from before Huxley gets to their home - when Huxley arrives in the subsequent years he was with a family disability is something that had to be talked about because of course disability is part of not only Huxley's life but by proxy the family's life right all of this was monetized and frankly I'm not for family bloggers at all I think it's it just I don't feel good about family bloggers so showing children at any level really online if they're the focus of all of your videos and there there's a camera always stuffed in their face I'm not okay with that but I truly feel like this child was seen as a product that was new and different and aside from commodifying the fact that Huxley had disabilities and that Huxley was Chinese because a big part of their like adoption journey was that since this child was from China obviously the steps are different obviously they had to travel far to even go see him so like there are all these things that make adopting Huxley a moneymaker in the sense of oh this is so different because this is a child from China and I'm assuming that's also what they would be going for if they adopted a child from Uganda Ethiopia again it would be a child that doesn't look at all like any of their other children which is what they're banking on so I'm sorry if this sounds terrible but to me all seems like the thought process behind this to me seems all about monetization all about commodifying the child's personhood going from their race to their disabilities so I also want to say that in this same vein of commodification it's also the fact that Huxley was monetized before he even entered the house before we even saw what he looked like plenty of people followed this channel specifically because they were interested in Huxley and his you know trajectory with the family from the beginning they got people's investment and I think that once they saw how invested people were getting they were seeing dollar signs as for the savior complex now obviously I'm not a psychologist so this is just me as a layperson saying anything I think there was a savior complex on Micah's side for sure I don't know about the husband because on our channel there aren't really videos of her husband sitting down sharing everything like she does but to me it seemed like when the medical professionals gave her the diagnosis and when the medical professionals were like hey this could actually be like difficult for you to manage or this could be you know above your ability to take care of she kind of just brushed it off and that to me is not because she had fully considered it and was aware and was ready to me it was more like first of all dollar signs but second of all it's like almost a disregard almost like you feel like you can quote unquote fix and I'm not saying the child needs fixing but that's what I think was going on in her head from an outside perspective was that like these disabilities were all just gonna be fine on a walk in the park and that's also what made me uncomfortable because it seemed like in a way the disabilities were commodified and in another way they were also undermined at the same time which is a weird kind of tension between those two things in certain situations I can see why people would have to give up a child I've come up with scenarios specific ones in my head where I can see a child needing to be given up which is tragic and horrible and and traumatic that being said I think this whole case reeks of irresponsibility in the sense of from the very beginning I don't really think due diligence was done here I don't think things were taken seriously like a voice before and I think that the idea of having a new and different child to their channel was really the selling point I was thinking about this before and I was thinking if they didn't have a Family Channel would they have adopted Huxley potentially maybe do I think so no I don't think Huxley would have been in the image at all if there were in a channel and if there weren't a chance to make money off of him so the whole thing of them not wanting a disabled child but then God has softened their hearts that to me was a bit of a red flag too because I was wondering how long did you really think about you know suddenly being okay with it because it's a harsh division and a stance to be like no we don't want a disabled child - yes we're fine with any disability ever because it seems like a very abrupt choice to make and like I said before there's nothing wrong with adopting a disabled child but be careful about saying yes to that if you're not prepared to do everything you need to do which they weren't it's just this was a responsibility the whole time in my opinion I'm frankly glad that their child is not with them anymore because think Huxley deserves a better family honestly a family that can take care of him to the fullest extent so I'm happy that Huxley is away from them I'm just sad that Huxley had to have anything to do with them in the first place so that's my opinion on that let me know what you guys think where do you stand let me know thank you guys so much for watching and thank you to my patrons as always and I'll catch you guys next time [Music] you

Channel: READY TO GLARE

Views: 628,271

Rating: 4.9601936 out of 5

Keywords: myka stauffer, huxley, huxley stauffer, james stauffer, stauffer family, adoption

Id: -5Nesf0uVoE

Length: 21min 24sec (1284 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 01 2020