Until recently, Myka and James Stauffer were parents to five children. Earlier today, People reported that the two had recently decided to "rehome" one of their children, Huxley. The pair adopted Huxley from China nearly three years ago, but they had a change of heart and decided to find a "forever mommy" for their son instead. Because, apparently, adopting a child doesn't mean that you are necessarily that "forever" home.
Myka and James are also part of social media groups for adoptive parents. In 2018, they even shared that they were hoping to adopt again.
In a post dated May 24, 2018, Myka wrote:
“Would love to hear some personal experiences of adopting out of birth order. Good and bad experiences please! We are praying about an older child right now and really want to educate our selves on all we need to know. Thank you.”
More disturbingly, they were reportedly looking into adopting a second child with “special needs.”
That isn't the only post that Myka made. Later, in August 2018, she wrote again: "We are praying about adopting again. And my husband wants me to ask what special needs would you consider minor or relatively easy to manage that most people wouldn't consider easy?"
Photos have also surfaced of a terrifying technique that Myka and James used to "teach" Huxley to stop sucking his thumb: wrapping the thumb in duct tape. The pair reportedly never tried this technique with their biological children, and it's unclear why they felt it was appropriate to try with Huxley.
There is also a video of Huxley with his thumb duct-taped, while Myka and James' daughter appears to be sucking her own thumb in the same video … and there's no tape on it. While some parents have noted that wrapping their child's thumb in medical tape helped with thumb sucking, it's difficult to understand why duct tape would be considered.
Others online have also shared really intense things that the pair appeared to think were OK parenting moves. On Twitter, user @shmailey_ shared that Myka and James allegedly decided their son was nonverbal after bringing him home, but the reality was that he didn't know English yet.
The idea of "rehoming" a child whom you have brought into your own family is not only morally repugnant, it also retraumatizes a child who has already lived through the trauma of being separated from their birth family. There are numerous studies that indicate children can and do suffer trauma from these separations, and that the trauma changes their brain chemistry.
Salud America! points to four key ways trauma changes the brains of developing children:
- Raising the levels of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. These hormones “help you react to a perceived threat or danger by directing blood flow to major muscle groups and bypassing the thinking part of the brain to activate the survival part.” Additionally, high levels of both “keep your blood pressure elevated, which weakens the heart and circulatory system; keep your glucose levels elevated, which can lead to type 2 diabetes; and disrupt your immune system and inflammatory response system, which can lead to lupus, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis, abdominal obesity, and depression, and reduce your ability to fight infection.”
- Changing your immune system responses. “Trauma is linked to thymus involution, atrophy of the spleen and lymph nodes, telomere shortening, and increased stress hormones, which impairs immunity and increases inflammation.”
- Neurological changes. “The prolonged activation of stress hormones in early childhood can reduce neural connections in the thinking area of the brain dedicated to learning and reasoning, thus limiting cognitive ability.”
- Epigenetic changes. “Trauma can induce epigenetic changes for genes related to mental health, obesity, drug addiction, immune function, metabolic disease, and heart disease.”
The idea of "rehoming" an adopted child isn't anything new. Myka and James are hardly the first people to decide that they didn't want to be adoptive parents after all. In 2013, Reuters published a piece about how the practice has proliferated and is generally not regulated … at all.
In the Reuters piece, the publication notes that when Todd and Melissa Puchalla decided that they didn't want to parent their adopted 16-year-old daughter after all, they just went online and found another home for her.
"No attorneys or child welfare officials came with them. The Puchallas simply signed a notarized statement declaring these virtual strangers to be Quita's guardians. The visit lasted just a few hours. It was the first and the last time the couples would meet."
If this appalls you, that's because it should. Parents who adopt and foster children are expected to treat the children the same way they would treat biological children. If you aren't capable of doing so, you really have no business even entering into the world of adoption and foster care.
And while Myka and James have said that Huxley's autism became too much for them to manage, in a video that she posted to her YouTube channel, Myka shared that the couple were told by the agency they adopted Huxley through that there was no way the agency could tell them everything Huxley might face.
It's disingenuous at best for the couple to now claim, "Once Huxley came home, there was a lot more special needs that we weren’t aware of, and that we were not told." No child arrives on this planet with a complete list of everything they might go through, and there's no way for a parent to find out everything their child might have.
When you make the choice to love and parent a child, that's what you're supposed to do. Sadly, it seems Myka and James just weren't up to it, or that they decided the payoff wasn't worth it after all. And now Huxley will live with these details of his life out there for the world to see, all on his ex-mom's YouTube channel to boot.
