Note: I don’t know the Stauffers personally, nor do I or was I EVER a subscriber to any of their channels. But I feel like, as a special needs parent, I need to at least voice my opinion on this.
So about a month ago, I started seeing things on Youtube blowing up over a mommy vlogger and her adopted special needs son. This isn’t something I’d normally pay attention to but it seemed like it was ALL over my suggested feed. So I checked it out.
Two inviduals, Mykka and her husband James Stauffer, had adopted a child from China a few years ago and this child, Huxley, had special needs. According to the Stauffers, he had a brain tumor but when they got him home (or maybe when they arrived in China and met him. I’m not 100% sure on that) they discovered that no he didn’t have a brain tumor. He was just autistic.
You can google Mykka Stauffer to see exactly what all the controversy is about but it boils down to this–she and her husband decided that after making an unknown amount of money from videos that either were just about her son Huxley or featured him in some way, they made the decision to “rehome” him. Yanno, like you’d do with a dog that didn’t quite fit into your lifestyle or maybe grew bigger than the 15 lbs the Humane Society said he would.
More and more came out about how Huxley’s autism just wasn’t what Mykka and James expected, that it was harder than they expected and he had some issues. Yanno, like a child adopted from a foreign country who’s been through unknown trauma might, stuff that (at least according to the research I did and the videos by adoptive parents that I watched) was totally normal. Stuff like food insecurity, feeling anxious, that sort of thing.
After claiming that she loved Huxley like her own child and that they were his forever family, they REHOMED HIM.
Let me say that again.
THEY REHOMED HIM.
Because it was too hard to be a parent of a special needs child. Because with three other kids under the age of (I believe..if I’m wrong, somebody correct me) 5, he just needed too much attention.
My reaction to that?
Immediately followed by this.
One of the videos I watched today which talked about how they’d been recently investigated by the Ohio (which is where they were living) department of health and human services, making sure the second adoption (er..I mean..rehoming) was on the up and up as well as whether or not her other 4 kids (yes, 4. She had a newborn shortly before or perhaps during the entire incident) were ok. One of the videos on the Youtube channel, “Without a Crystal Ball”, said that her lawyer basically had to ask her to shut the heck up because every time she opened her mouth, she was just digging herself deeper into a hole. That Mykka NEEDED to explain why they did what they did, why raising him was SO hard (which I don’t doubt it was!), yadda yadda yadda. But her lawyer was like, “I don’t think so.”
I don’t doubt that raising a child who you adopted from a foreign country is hard. There are a lot of issues that are involved with that.
But the issue that really hit home the most was that the Stauffers just thought it was too darn hard to raise a child with ‘level 3 autism’.
Now, prior to watching some reaction videos and researching this, I’d never heard of ‘levels’ of autism. But apparently it’s a thing.
I guess if you go by this graphic, my son is somewhere between level two and level one with most days being level two. And yeah, raising a child who is ANYWHEERE on the autism spectrum is hard.
It’s hard when you don’t understand WHY your kid does the things they do, like chew/suck on their fingers for comfort. One of the things that Mykka brought up was that they’d BOUGHT him an expensive guard to keep him from sucking his thumb (although her other “normal” kids were allowed to suck THEIR thumbs with no consequences apparently) and when he broke it or whatever, instead of sucking it up and buying a new one (which they could afford, according to some sources) they put duct tape on his thumb instead.
That broke my heart. Autistic kids (and hell, kids in general) self soothe in ways that baffle most of us. My own son has a finger and one of his thumbs that are, at this point, probably permanently deformed from the large calluses that have developed from his near constant sucking/chewing on them. We’ve tried other options…they just end up getting destroyed and then he gets mad about it. He can’t (or won’t, we hope) chew off his own fingers. If he does..well..we’ll deal with it when it happens. But fortunately, the calluses seem to provide him with the stimulation/comfort he wants and needs.
Another issue the Stauffers had with Huxley was that he supposedly was OVERLY attached to food. I found out that’s a common problem with adopted children who really want and need to know that there will always be enough food, that food will come at regular intervals. Huxley threw a LOT of fits around eating, according to the Stauffers and Mykka complained that he would stare at her husband James while he ate, which bothered the crap out of him to the point he (James, a grown adult) would be so disgusted he couldn’t eat.
Another big red flag/problem was that they (the Stauffers) admitted to having private family time with just the biological kids after Huxley was asleep. Which, OK…I can see that to a point. When you have a special needs kid, they are going to need a LOT of attention and you have to find ways to give any other kids you might have (especially when they are as young as the Stauffer’s children) attention as well. My sister in law, who has 3 kids (none of whom are special needs) and she and her husband regularly will have ‘dates’ with just one of them so that everybody gets the amount of extra attention they may not get on a daily basis.
You can’t just ‘rehome’ a kid with special needs because they won’t perform on camera like your other kids or they don’t fit into your lifestyle. You have to learn to adapt to THEM and what they need. Raising special needs kids is hard and I’ve said it before, it will chew you up, spit you out, wreck your heart and then laugh at you while daring you to come back for more. Which as a parent, it’s kind of your JOB to come back for more. It’s your JOB to make sure your kids get the best help you can afford, which Mykka clearly was uninterested in doing for Huxley. And that makes me sad.
The real kicker is that, going into the whole thing, she and her husband KNEW Huxley was going to be special needs. They KNEW. Doctors, friends, everybody was saying “You can’t handle this.” and they ignored them for the Youtube clout, the insane number of views and the money that would follow.
Nobody seems to know where Huxley is now, but according to the the authorities in Ohio, he is safe and he is in a home that is way more suited to his needs, thank goodness.
Raising a child with autism is hard, but it’s not a journey I would give up for the world even if sometimes my son does make me want to flip him off with both hands. I love the shit out of him and I always have and always will. Because he is MY kid. He is complicated, funny, smart, sassy and at times (because teenagers gonna teenager) a royal pain in the ass.
JUST tonight, I went in his bathroom and it looked like a bomb had gone off. I asked him what happened and he was like, ‘What? It’s not SUPPOSED to look like this?” with that wide eyed puppy dog look that he knows will sometimes get him out of messes he has created for himself. He cleaned it up, sprayed some air freshener (because it smelled like deep fried death) and I explained that no bathroom should ever look or smell like that. That I NEVER wanted to see his bathroom in that kind of state again. He apologized and I forgave him and then he made a terrible joke.
If I had known when I gave birth to him that it was going to be THIS much of a struggle, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to handle it, honestly. My life was already complicated with my joint issues and my depression and my anxiety and my husband’s OCD and ADHD. I didn’t need or really even want to add even more chaos to our lives. But we kind of didn’t get a choice. You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit, as J’s preschool teacher used to say.
Well, OK. So there have been times when I have railed at the universe, at God, at whoever was responsible for us having a child with this many issues. I threw massive fits over t he fact that we both (though it’s truthfully mostly me probably) for giving him such jacked up genes in the first place.
But you cry, you throw a hissy fit, you maybe drink some wine or beer or whatever your alcohol of choice is and you get over it. Because you’re an adult and that’s what adults do. Or are supposed to.
I guess Mykka Stauffer just couldn’t..maybe she just wasn’t adult enough or mature enough or enough SOMETHING. Enough of a caring human being. Something. I don’t know.
I’m forced to wonder, though, how much this goes on behind the scenes for people who aren’t major Youtube influencers. How many kids this has happened to, whether they were foreign born or domestically born. And if it’s allowed to happen, WHY?
Special needs kiddos are often not capable of standing up for themselves, so we have to do it for them. Somebody SHOULD have done it for Huxley, before things got this bad.