A YouTuber who spent the past few years chronicling not only the stressful process of adopting a Chinese toddler with special needs, but also her life with that child, has announced she and her husband gave the child away.
Buzzfeed News reported that Myka Stauffer “spent years sharing intimate details of her son Huxley’s life on a monetized channel.” Before she adopted the child in 2017, Stauffer chronicled the adoption process on her channel. Huxley helped her channel grow to hundreds of thousands of followers and receive high-profile sponsorships. Stauffer has also given numerous interviews and even written an article for Parade about her life with Huxley. She portrayed herself as an advocate for international adoption and watched her social media profiles grow: 717,000 YouTube subscribers for her personal channel and 332,000 for her family channel.
In the article she wrote for Parade, Stauffer said the couple was initially against adopting a special needs child when they first learned Huxley had a “brain tumor” and “brain damage.”
“But as we let the idea soak in, God softened our hearts,” she wrote in the article. “Before we knew it, we were open to almost every special needs in the book.”
In an article for pregnancy and parenting website The Bump, Stauffer said “I quickly learned that Huxley wasn’t the one who needed to change – it was me,” next to a photo of her holding her adopted son while wearing designer clothes and her hair in curls.
In Parade, Stauffer said Huxley’s special needs file had been “inaccurate,” and that he had actually been diagnosed with “having a stroke in utero, has level 3 autism, and sensory processing disorder.”
Still, she wrote, he “is a great kid and his condition doesn’t involve that much overall care—all you need is a big heart and practice patience everyday.”
As Buzzfeed reported, Stauffer’s last update on Huxley was posted in September 2019. “Emotional China Adoption Update Two Years Home,” she wrote, adding that Huxley had been in applied behavior analysis therapy for his autism.
“He is doing so well and I am so excited to see the huge steps forward he makes in his third year after being adopted from China,” she wrote.
Buzzfeed reported that Huxley “continued to appear in photos on Instagram and in YouTube videos in late 2019 and into 2020.”
But as winter turned into Spring, Huxley disappeared from the Stauffers’ YouTube channels. On February 16, Stauffer addressed the difficulties of raising a child with special needs.
“We have hard days, lots of them. I wish autism and adoption trauma had a manual to direct you through it all,” she wrote.
On Tuesday, the Stauffers announced they had given Huxley to another family for his emotional well-being.
“After multiple assessments, after multiple evaluations, numerous medical professionals have felt that he needed a different fit in his medical needs, he needed more,” Myka said in the video.
The couple said they hadn’t announced this sooner due in part to legal reasons, which they didn’t explain. They said they left out “99% of the struggles” they endured with Huxley from their social media accounts. At one point in the video, Myka said “multiple scary things happened inside the home towards our other children.”
“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,” she claimed, adding that Huxley was now with “the perfect match” family and that they would always love him.
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