In October 2017, Myka and James Stauffer adopted a toddler from China. By May 2020, after years of chronicling Huxley’s medical and emotional struggles online, the Stauffers announced they had placed their adopted son with a “new forever family.”
Their story is just one egregious example of the dark side of family vlogging, a popular genre of influencing that often sparks discourse over the exploitation of children, no matter how innocent the content seems on its face. An Update on Our Family, a new HBO documentary series, explores this phenomenon through the lens of the Stauffer family controversy in order to facilitate a conversation “about privacy on the internet, the nuances of transnational adoption, and the unregulated industry of monetizing one’s family.”
