Mommy blogging and child abuse are not as unrelated as you may think.

By nature, mommy blogging is an invasion of a child’s privacy, and regardless of what any mommy blogger might try to argue, children are not capable of consenting to growing up in front of an audience. Sure, posting about your kid’s personal life might not be as cut-and-dry as physically beating them, but abuse is a complex spectrum. Enough children of mommy bloggers express discomfort with their situations as they hit their teenage years that it’s impossible to deny the potential for lasting psychological damage.

All of this is to say that mommy bloggers aren’t exactly selfless parents in the first place. But even amidst an online space crowded by people of dubious morality, Myka Stauffer stands out as especially horrific.

Myka Stauffer

I wasn’t familiar with Myka Stauffer until I read about her in a recent BuzzFeed News piece detailing how she very publicly adopted an autistic two-year-old from China and then very quietly rehomed him two and a half years later after having another biological child of her own.

As an autistic person myself, I’ll be upfront here. It’s impossible for me to speak about this from a neutral perspective. So here goes: The idea of adopting a child with special needs when you’re unprepared to do so, and then getting rid of that child because their special needs are difficult to deal with, is very upsetting in the first place. But fundraising your “adoption journey” while you publicly disregard the opinions of a physician telling you that you’re probably not up to the task of taking care of this child’s specific needs, and then secretly getting rid of the kid like a dog after monetizing his image, tantrums, and “progress” updates for two years…Jesus f*cking Christ.

Look, I’m not going to say that Myka Stauffer did what she did with any intent to harm the little boy (who she renamed “Huxley” upon adoption, despite the fact that he was two and likely already used to hearing his original name). Rather, I assume her actions came from a place of deep self-absorption, although I don’t know her, so I can’t say for sure. What I do know is that raising a child with autism is extremely hard work, and if your primary focus is making cheery, monetized progress videos of the kid, you’re setting him up for failure and clearly don’t have his best interest at heart.

If Myka Stauffer really cared about providing a proper environment for Huxley, she might have considered that Huxley had spent the first two years of his life listening to another language, and the sudden transition to a wholly English-speaking environment might create added barriers to development, instead of simply deciding that he was “non-verbal” immediately after taking him from China to the US.

If Myka had any idea what she was doing, she would realize that thumb-sucking is oftentimes a form of stimming (self-stimulating) for people with autism, which is a necessary comfort mechanism and aspect of childhood development, and as such, she never would have duct-taped his thumb to prevent the behavior. In fact, many autistic people consider the forcible stopping of stimming to be an active form of physical abuse.

Quite honestly, if Myka Stauffer was actually interested in doing what was necessary to take care of a special needs child like Huxley, she probably wouldn’t have had another child so shortly after adopting him. The majority of people who adopt special needs children do so knowing that those kids will require a great deal of effort, energy, and parental attention. You don’t drag an autistic child into a new country, completely outside of their comfort zone, throw stressful, scary stimuli at them (i.e. a new baby), and expect them to be fine.

Of course Huxley wasn’t fine in the environment Mykah Stauffer and her husband, James, dropped him into. So after having a very publicized new biological baby, the Stauffers decided Huxley’s special needs really were too much for them to handle in the background of all their happiness. Amidst all their birth vlog footage, they didn’t even tell their viewers that they had given Huxley away like an unwanted pet.

To be clear, I think that rehoming Huxley was absolutely the right move and, indeed, was easily the best thing that the Stauffers ever did for him. The disgusting part is that Huxley’s benefit appears to be incidental. To Myka Stauffer and her husband, Huxley was an accessory—an autistic child adopted from China to set their family brand apart, rather than a real, individual person with real, specialized needs that would have required an actual lifestyle shift to support.

After spending a long period of time deleting and blocking fans asking about Huxley’s unexplained absence from Stauffer family videos, Myka and James finally released an oh-so-emotional, color-coordinated video about how Huxley had so many more problems than they ever realized and that really, Huxley wanted this.

Look, here’s the rub. You adopted an autistic child from another country against your own trusted physician’s recommendations, failed to provide him with a proper support environment, and then got rid of him when (of course) things got too hard. I can’t even imagine the emotional toll and stress that such a saga must have had on Huxley during some of his most important developmental years, and I sincerely hope that Huxley’s new family is able to repair some of that damage and give him the environment he needs to thrive.

Myka Stauffer wasn’t just ignorant when she adopted a special needs child without proper preparations. She was arrogant, and the result was child abuse. But hey, her whitewashed explanation video about why she really discarded Huxley has over 400,000 views, so I guess for her, everything worked out in the end.