In 2020, family vloggers Myka and James Stauffer tearfully announced to their followers that their adopted son was now living with another family. The new three-part documentary series An update on our family, which premiered at the Tribeca Festival in June, explores the events leading up to the announcement that the child was “rehomed,” the reaction that followed, and the nuances of this sensitive issue.
Director Rachel Mason told Yahoo Entertainment that a 2020 New York magazine article 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, I felt like an anthropologist observing an unknown species from a very distant distance with binoculars,” she said. “The most important thing for me was to start getting closer, and to do that I wanted to meet the people who really operate in this world. … I wanted to understand their appeal and how they maintain their audience.”
The Stauffer family started posting to YouTube as a family in 2014, sharing everything from products they liked to heartwarming stories about miscarriages and parenting struggles. In 2017, the Stauffers traveled with their three biological children to China to adopt Huxley, an autistic child. They posted frequently about their challenges, from the behavioral impact of their trauma, to the events leading up to their adoption, to their medical prognosis. They showed his breakdowns and talked openly about the difficulty of being his father.
The Stauffers’ popularity grew as they posted about Huxley and eventually began receiving sponsorships from brands, according to New York magazine. They had another biological child and began discussing the possibility of adopting another. Fans examined them closely and eventually I noticed that in one video Huxley’s car seat appeared to be missing from the 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 the child a new home. Myka said she felt “like a failure as a mother.”
“Once 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 mom” with a medical background. “We never wanted to be in this position. And we’ve been trying to meet his needs and help him as much as possible…we really love him.”
The reaction was immediate and severe. They received countless hateful comments, including death threats. Other creators went from encouraging them to insulting them, leading the Stauffers to shut down their channel. Some of these videos from other creators are featured in the documentary. Mason said he 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 applauded them… and then they also started to have expectations,” she said. “Then [we see] how more people in the YouTube community started investigating and seeing things that disturbed them, and that’s how the whole story ended up being exposed.”
To do more than just recall a terrible situation and the critical response to it, Mason felt he needed to hear from someone who had experience with adoption dissolution in order to properly tell the story. The docuseries team spoke to a mother who posted on Reddit that she “Myka Stauffer’d” her son.
“In her post, she felt the need to write ‘no death threats, please,’ which I found to be one of the sadly consistent themes overall in the film – how people have become conditioned to get the most hostile types of responses.” , Mason said. “She was able to expose how unthinkable it is for a family to deal with this decision.”
Another voice 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 carefully scrutinized his channel in the months leading up to the video and how audiences consumed his content,” Mason said. “She helped explain the story…with a kind of personal nuance that came from her own story.”
Ultimately, Mason doesn’t see the project as an indictment of the Stauffers or the family vloggers – but rather of the “reactionary and polarized” system that currently exists on the internet.
“Expectations [for creators] … are very high, and I fear that we have collectively prepared ourselves to become more extreme in our behavior,” she said. “I hope we find a way to become more human by telling this story.”
Myka no longer posts on social media, although James maintains a YouTube channel about cars called “Stauffer Garage.” Huxley no longer goes by that name. His new adoptive family chose not to participate in the docu-series. Since debuting at the Tribeca Festival An update on our family has not yet announced a general release date.
