In 2020, family vloggers Myka and James Stauffer tearfully announced to their followers that their adopted child was now living with another family. The new three-part docuseries An update about our family, which premiered at the Tribeca Festival in June, explores the events leading up to the announcement that the child was being “rehomed,” the response that followed, and the nuances of this sensitive issue.
Director Rachel Mason told Yahoo Entertainment that a 2020 article in New York Magazine about the Stauffers made her want to dig deeper. At the time, she didn’t know much about family channels on YouTube, but approached the creator ecosystem with “real fascination.”
“When I started diving into it, I felt like an anthropologist looking through binoculars at an unknown species from far away,” she said. “What was most important to me was to get closer together, and to do that I wanted to meet the people who are actually active in this world. … I wanted to understand their appeal and how they retain their audience.”
The Stauffer family started posting on YouTube as a family in 2014, sharing everything from products they loved to tearful stories of miscarriages and parenting struggles. In 2017, the Stauffers traveled to China with their three biological children to adopt Huxley, an autistic toddler. They posted regularly about his challenges, from the behavioral impact of his trauma, from events leading up to the adoption to his medical prognosis. They showed his breakdowns and talked openly about the difficulty of raising him.
The Stauffers’ popularity grew as they posted about Huxley, and eventually they started getting sponsorships from brands, according to New York magazine. They had another biological child and began discussing the possibility of adopting another child. Fans watched them closely and eventually noticed that in one video, Huxley’s car seat appeared to have disappeared from their car.
After three years of documenting Huxley’s adoption process, the Stauffers tearfully announced in a May 2020 YouTube video that they had decided to find a new home for the child. Myka said she felt like “a failure as a mother.”
“When Huxley came home, there were a lot more special needs that we weren’t aware of and weren’t told about,” James said, explaining that Huxley was living with a “new mother,” one with medical training. ‘We never wanted to be in this position. And we tried to meet his needs and help him as much as possible. …we really love him.”
The reaction was immediate and severe. They received numerous hateful comments, including death threats. Other creators went from encouraging them to insulting them, which led to the Stauffers shutting down their channel. Some of those videos from other makers can be seen in the documentary. Mason said she chose to include them because they create a “portrait of a culture” that the Stauffers were a part of.
“We see how brands encouraged their content, how fans encouraged them … and then started to have expectations as well,” she said. “Than [we see] the more people in the YouTube community started digging and saw things that disturbed them, and the whole story eventually came to light.”
To do more than just rehash a terrible situation and the critical response to it, Mason felt she needed to hear from someone who had experience with adoption dissolution to tell the story properly. The docuseries team spoke with a mother who posted on Reddit that she gave her child “Myka Stauffer.”
“In her post, she felt the need to write ‘no death threats please,’ which I found to be one of the unfortunately consistent themes overall in the film – how conditioned people have become to receive the most hostile responses,” Mason said. “She was able to demonstrate how unthinkable it is for a family to struggle with that decision.”
Another voice that Mason found essential in explaining the Stauffers’ story was Hannah Cho, a YouTuber who is also a transracial adoptee.
“[Cho] “articulated how the YouTube community had carefully researched their channel in the months leading up to their video, and how their audience had consumed their content,” Mason said. “She helped explain the story… with a kind of personal nuance that came from her own story.”
Ultimately, Mason sees the project not as an exposé about the Stauffers or family vloggers, but as the “reactionary and polarized” system that currently exists on the Internet.
“Expectations [for creators] … are very high, and I fear that we have collectively led ourselves to become more extreme in our behavior,” she said. “I hope we find a way to become more human through the telling of this story.”
Myka no longer posts on social media, although James maintains a YouTube channel about cars called ‘Stauffer Garage’. Huxley no longer bears that name. His new adoptive family chose not to participate in the docuseries. Since its premiere at the Tribeca Festival, An update about our family has not yet announced a general release date.
