Not a YouTuber but Kristen Howerton/Rage Against the minivan. She has two sons from international adoption.
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I’d love Angela to comment but sadly think she will keep out of this! Smart move if she does as nothing can justify the stauffers actions!
I’ve watched their videos on and off for years (never liked them, all so fake). I even watched some videos around the time they adopted Hux. I just found out that they gave him up and had to look for a thread. I honestly feel sick to my stomach.
That poor little boy. First he loses his biological family (not sure if they gave him up or he was orphaned), taken away from his own culture, into a new family, then his ADOPTIVE family give him up?? No wonder the poor boy has attachment issues. And he most likely will, even more so now, for the rest of his life. I can’t imagine how distressing it must be for him right now. Wondering why his mum and dad left him
I don’t know how they can sleep at night. Heck, he wasn’t even my kid and I know I’ll probably lie awake thinking about him.
What is really telling is that despite having so many challenges with Hux, they still went ahead and had ANOTHER (planned) baby. Huxley already required so much attention from them (probably as much as a newborn/toddler). That is so selfish on their part. First they adopted him, plastered his face all over YouTube. Used him for their own financial gain. Then when the views started slowing they hopped right back on the baby train again to make some more money. And NOW things are too hard for them. They should not have planned to had another baby if it meant they would not be able to meet all of his needs.
Had this been one of their other children, they would have never ‘given them up’. Huxley may have had attachment issues but it’s clear that they had no attachment to him either, otherwise they would have never been able to go through with it. It was always obvious that Huxley wasn’t accepted by them and didn’t fit into their ‘perfect’ YouTube/Instagram life. I think they saw him as more of an inconvenience which is just heartbreaking. A parent should do anything for their young child, kill or be killed, there’s no question about it. He deserved better
Bless him. I really hope he finds a new family that will prioritise his needs above all else and will never make him doubt how truly loved he is
That poor little boy. First he loses his biological family (not sure if they gave him up or he was orphaned), taken away from his own culture, into a new family, then his ADOPTIVE family give him up?? No wonder the poor boy has attachment issues. And he most likely will, even more so now, for the rest of his life. I can’t imagine how distressing it must be for him right now. Wondering why his mum and dad left him
I don’t know how they can sleep at night. Heck, he wasn’t even my kid and I know I’ll probably lie awake thinking about him.What is really telling is that despite having so many challenges with Hux, they still went ahead and had ANOTHER (planned) baby. Huxley already required so much attention from them (probably as much as a newborn/toddler). That is so selfish on their part. First they adopted him, plastered his face all over YouTube. Used him for their own financial gain. Then when the views started slowing they hopped right back on the baby train again to make some more money. And NOW things are too hard for them. They should not have planned to had another baby if it meant they would not be able to meet all of his needs.
Had this been one of their other children, they would have never ‘given them up’. Huxley may have had attachment issues but it’s clear that they had no attachment to him either, otherwise they would have never been able to go through with it. It was always obvious that Huxley wasn’t accepted by them and didn’t fit into their ‘perfect’ YouTube/Instagram life. I think they saw him as more of an inconvenience which is just heartbreaking. A parent should do anything for their young child, kill or be killed, there’s no question about it. He deserved better
Bless him. I really hope he finds a new family that will prioritise his needs above all else and will never make him doubt how truly loved he is
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I’ve thought this too, the reason they’re keeping it private is because he was taken rather than they gave him up,
They've gone and deleted every single negative comment on that video.
They both just across as a pair of utter duck witts, but my god the whole story with the little boy is tragic, it’s just so bloody sad I just hope that whoever he is with now is looking after him properly and he can go on to have a normal upbringing
This was only a comment made by someone commenting on another you tube video- I’ve watched a lot of stuff about her today I’m finding it all quite shocking tbh
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how on earth are her followers increasing.
Are they buying the ones they’re loosing?
That can only be the reason...
People will follow out of nosiness.
YouTuber accused of taping son's hands and using adoption to boost follows
YouTube star Myka Stauffer is facing a ferocious backlash after she admitted she had 'rehomed' her autistic son three years after adopting him from China
Surely this is child abuse
I really feel like there should be some legal repercussions from this. This is emotional abuse to the child, he formed attachments and bonds with the parents but also his siblings, who he will likely not see again. It makes me sick and heartbroken
I mean its edited but that does not look like a severe child at all. AT ALL. duck her
This woman puts all of the other influencers that I can’t stand to shame! What they did is deplorable. And the fact that they are still so consumed with maintaining subscriber numbers and sanitising their comment section, only further proves that these people are the worst.
Since I learnt about this, I can't stop thinking about Hux and what he's been through. My two children were adopted and (we're in the UK though) and I've just got to get a few things off my chest.
The first thing isn't going to make me popular, but I think it's worth saying that children who have been abused and neglected in early childhood can behave in scary ways. I won't go into detail about my two, who were both older than Hux when my husband and I adopted them, but the first few years were literally about keeping everyone in the family safe. We made it through, absolutely no thanks to the useless child mental health services in this country, and thank goodness my kids are now young adults and doing well.
I have however known families where an adopted child had to be removed from the home (in the UK it's known as 'disruption') because they were too much of a danger to other members of the family. For those asking if MS would've 'rehomed' a birth child in this way, no child becomes a danger to themselves or others unless they have been traumatised by abuse and neglect. The child's behaviour is entirely about trauma.
I knew no different because I didn't have bio children, but I can only imagine the shock that a mother used to fairly well-behaved and loving children would experience having to parent a traumatised child. Some mothers can manage eventually. This one couldn't.
The second thing; I have never in all my life watched anything as vacuous, fake and disingenuous as as those videos by MS. Never heard of her before all this, but MY GOD! Is this typical content of mothers who make a commodity of their family life on social media? The sickly sweet proclamations, the "sponsored by" posts, the bragging, the packaging of life as a soap opera with headings, treating children like they are actors in a TV programme. We all present ourselves in chosen ways on different media, even in real life, but the deliberate commercialisation of your own family like this is unhealthy and narcissistic.
Which leads my to my final point. MS and her useless husband saw adoption as "beautiful" and a "crazy adventure". Adoption is none of those things. Adoption is loss, grief and trauma. Yes, wonderful things can come from adoption - my family is doing well these days - but those things are made in blood, sweat and tears. There's no place in the world of insta-moms' perfectly packaged lives for the dark business of creating a family when Trauma is an uninvited guest.
MS did not get this from the start to the end of her relationship with Huxley. She was obsessed with him "catching up" and with his "progress", like the only problem here was his delayed learning. In the video made with him when the poor chap was only seven weeks in placement, the stupid women didn't even grasp the fact that he couldn't speak English.
At one point I'm sure she said he was doing 7 hours a day, 6 days a week of the ABA programme, plus pre-school. That's a longer working week than most adults, and this is for a boy of what? 3 years, going into 4 years of age? A boy who couldn't speak English and who was operating at the age of about a 1 or 2 year old? And she wondered why he was having meltdowns!
She expected him to fit in from the start. Ignored all advice and took the family off for a holiday on a few weeks into placement, and then planned another one soon after. What this boy needed at the time, and would continue to need for years and years, was routine. Boring, repetitive routine. He needed plenty of one-on-one time with his new mum, difficult with three other kids, but not impossible with the others at school and a pro-active father.
As other people on here have said, she could've hired help. She should've hired help. Either to manage the house and help with the other children, or a nanny for Hux who was trained in trauma and /or autism.
But she was never going to do that, was she? How would she keep her followers and the money flowing in and the free jumpers from Amazon, if she wasn't playing the part of super mum? She had an ideal of who she was, who her family was, and what demographic they were aimed at. She was never going to change that for the benefit of a boy she and her husband had taken from another country, a boy disabled by brain damage, unable to speak the language, who didn't have a first clue what a family was, because he had never been in one before, or a home because he had never had one before.
She and her husband just threw money at Huxley, paying thousands of pounds to try and "fix" him, but what they wouldn't do is change one iota of their family lifestyle for him. And that is unforgivable.
Every video where she talks about Huxley, how she would never give him up, how she wouldn't change him for the world, how all bonded to him they all were, all lies. Lies, lies, lies.
She couldve started being real when the reality of adopting a neglected child with special needs got real, but instead she kept crapping out fairytales.
And the addition of a new baby, a fifth child, when she didn't have the time to start with, or the flexibility, to meet Huxley's needs? MS wanted a new baby, so MS had a new baby, and damn everyone else. Mother Of Five! How great that would look to everyone on social media? How amazing would she look? WHAT A SUPER MUM!
But the most telling thing of all? When Huxley was 're-homed' she just kept churning out her idiotic, vacuous rubbish. She didn't honour Huxley or her family by taking time away from the videos. She couldn't let the perfect image of herself or her family go, or risk losing money. That is the most sickening behaviour and shows her to be a narcissist at best and a psychopath at worst.
This boy is better off away from these moronic, self-absorbed, shallow, egotistical, monsters.
The first thing isn't going to make me popular, but I think it's worth saying that children who have been abused and neglected in early childhood can behave in scary ways. I won't go into detail about my two, who were both older than Hux when my husband and I adopted them, but the first few years were literally about keeping everyone in the family safe. We made it through, absolutely no thanks to the useless child mental health services in this country, and thank goodness my kids are now young adults and doing well.
I have however known families where an adopted child had to be removed from the home (in the UK it's known as 'disruption') because they were too much of a danger to other members of the family. For those asking if MS would've 'rehomed' a birth child in this way, no child becomes a danger to themselves or others unless they have been traumatised by abuse and neglect. The child's behaviour is entirely about trauma.
I knew no different because I didn't have bio children, but I can only imagine the shock that a mother used to fairly well-behaved and loving children would experience having to parent a traumatised child. Some mothers can manage eventually. This one couldn't.
The second thing; I have never in all my life watched anything as vacuous, fake and disingenuous as as those videos by MS. Never heard of her before all this, but MY GOD! Is this typical content of mothers who make a commodity of their family life on social media? The sickly sweet proclamations, the "sponsored by" posts, the bragging, the packaging of life as a soap opera with headings, treating children like they are actors in a TV programme. We all present ourselves in chosen ways on different media, even in real life, but the deliberate commercialisation of your own family like this is unhealthy and narcissistic.
Which leads my to my final point. MS and her useless husband saw adoption as "beautiful" and a "crazy adventure". Adoption is none of those things. Adoption is loss, grief and trauma. Yes, wonderful things can come from adoption - my family is doing well these days - but those things are made in blood, sweat and tears. There's no place in the world of insta-moms' perfectly packaged lives for the dark business of creating a family when Trauma is an uninvited guest.
MS did not get this from the start to the end of her relationship with Huxley. She was obsessed with him "catching up" and with his "progress", like the only problem here was his delayed learning. In the video made with him when the poor chap was only seven weeks in placement, the stupid women didn't even grasp the fact that he couldn't speak English.
At one point I'm sure she said he was doing 7 hours a day, 6 days a week of the ABA programme, plus pre-school. That's a longer working week than most adults, and this is for a boy of what? 3 years, going into 4 years of age? A boy who couldn't speak English and who was operating at the age of about a 1 or 2 year old? And she wondered why he was having meltdowns!
She expected him to fit in from the start. Ignored all advice and took the family off for a holiday on a few weeks into placement, and then planned another one soon after. What this boy needed at the time, and would continue to need for years and years, was routine. Boring, repetitive routine. He needed plenty of one-on-one time with his new mum, difficult with three other kids, but not impossible with the others at school and a pro-active father.
As other people on here have said, she could've hired help. She should've hired help. Either to manage the house and help with the other children, or a nanny for Hux who was trained in trauma and /or autism.
But she was never going to do that, was she? How would she keep her followers and the money flowing in and the free jumpers from Amazon, if she wasn't playing the part of super mum? She had an ideal of who she was, who her family was, and what demographic they were aimed at. She was never going to change that for the benefit of a boy she and her husband had taken from another country, a boy disabled by brain damage, unable to speak the language, who didn't have a first clue what a family was, because he had never been in one before, or a home because he had never had one before.
She and her husband just threw money at Huxley, paying thousands of pounds to try and "fix" him, but what they wouldn't do is change one iota of their family lifestyle for him. And that is unforgivable.
Every video where she talks about Huxley, how she would never give him up, how she wouldn't change him for the world, how all bonded to him they all were, all lies. Lies, lies, lies.
She couldve started being real when the reality of adopting a neglected child with special needs got real, but instead she kept crapping out fairytales.
And the addition of a new baby, a fifth child, when she didn't have the time to start with, or the flexibility, to meet Huxley's needs? MS wanted a new baby, so MS had a new baby, and damn everyone else. Mother Of Five! How great that would look to everyone on social media? How amazing would she look? WHAT A SUPER MUM!
But the most telling thing of all? When Huxley was 're-homed' she just kept churning out her idiotic, vacuous rubbish. She didn't honour Huxley or her family by taking time away from the videos. She couldn't let the perfect image of herself or her family go, or risk losing money. That is the most sickening behaviour and shows her to be a narcissist at best and a psychopath at worst.
This boy is better off away from these moronic, self-absorbed, shallow, egotistical, monsters.
You're completely right. Regarding your first point (which is also true and I dont think is unpopular at all) this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone seriously considering adoption. They should have done extensive research, spoken to professionals, read about adoption, childhood trauma, development, the lot. I read they chose Huxley from his adoption posting online, so they had the time to find out what his specific issues were and whether they were equipped to handle that. Yes, they claim other issues came to light later, but that can happen with any child, but as a parent you have to adapt, they didn't want to, as you rightly pointed out. Their life is about YouTube and instagram aesthetic and they couldnt have any messiness ruining that. I cannot understand this trend of families filming every aspect of their lives and posting it online, from pregnancy updates to the literal moment their child comes out, to potty training to problems at school. Its violation after violation of privacy and it is going to have effects on these kids. It will be interesting to see in 10 years when the first generation of youtube babies have become adults what they actually become.