The Disturbing World Of Youtube Family Channels

Written By Kaelyn Moore

The Stauffer family was accused of adopting a boy from China for social media clout, only to abandon him when it got too hard. What's the real story behind their decision, and what does that say about other families that put their children all over youtube?

TW: Child Abuse, Child Neglect

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TRANSCRIPT

In April of 2020, James Stauffer uploaded a video of the inside of his car to his youtube channel, Stauffer’s Garage. This was a side project to his family's usual youtube channel called  The Stauffer Life, where he and his wife, Myka, extensively documented their ever growing family. 


But all of that was about to change when James uploaded this specific video to Stauffer’s garage. Within minutes of it going live comments started flooding in, not about what was in the video, but what was missing from it.


See, in the backseat of Jame’s car were car seats for his four children. They were neatly snapped in place in the second and third rows of his family sized SUV. Except one of the carseats was very obviously missing. The one that belonged to his four year old son, who I’ll call H. 


“Where is H’s car seat? Why is his the only car seat missing?” Comments read. people were coming in so fast, it was hard to catch them all, but fans noticed that any comments referring to the missing car seat started disappearing. They were being intentionally erased by someone on the other side.


though for fans that had watched closely as the family had recorded and uploaded every milestone, growth spurt, accomplishment, and transition in their life, they felt that this unaddressed gap in the Stauffer’s back seat was indicative of something the family didn’t want them to know. I mean they had watched weekly videos of H integrating into the stauffers life, he was a huge part of their content, so where was his car seat?


The truth of the matter was the four year old’s car seat was missing because there was no longer a four year old that would need it. H was no longer a part of the Stauffer family, and the story of what happened to him was much more confusing, and heartbreaking than anyone expected. Within the next few months, that missing car seat was going to be making headlines. Headlines like


“Why did these Youtubers give away their son?”


This is heart starts pounding, and I’m your host Kaelyn Moore. And today, I want to tell you a story of something I’ve been darkly curious about for quite some time. how children get exploited on the internet, how we live in an age without rules and regulations on what parents can make their kids do for views and likes, and what happens when that gets taken advantage of.


But first, a few ads, and as always, listener discretion is advised.


I feel like I’ve been bombarded with family influencers ever since I signed up for social media. 


It’s usually a beautiful and (at least in my experience) shockingly blonde family doing some sort of choreographed dance or perfect lip synch to trending audio. Mom and dad are making overly enthusiastic facial expressions and behind them are their children, sometimes ones that look only days old, participating in the video. And whenever I get these videos, I’m always shocked at the view count, 5 million views, 10 million views, some over 25 million. This is wildly popular content, and as a result, it’s wildly lucrative. It was once estimated that the Labrant Family youtube page generated $15,000 a DAY


But recently, I’ve noticed audiences pushing back. People seem legitimately worried about the intentions of some parents putting their kids on the internet for all to see. There’s no privacy for these children. Not to mention their work schedules. When parents upload their children doing four choreographed dances a day, does that leave any time in their schedule to just be... Kids?


One of the highest profile cases in this arena, and one of the first big youtube family scandals is the case of the Stauffer family. There is a new documentary coming out about their scandal, and that’s probably because Their case feels more relevant today than it did when it happened back in 2020.


Let’s start at the beginning. 

Myka Stauffer always wanted to be a youtuber. When she met her husband James in 2012, she was 25 years old working as a nurse in Ohio, and had recently started uploading videos to youtube. Most of her original content was about mommy weight loss and cooking meals for her vegetarian 2 year old, whom she had with a previous partner. 


It wasn’t making a ton of money, but Youtube was helping her pay bills, and when she met James on OkCupid that year, not only was he down to be a step dad to Myka’s daughter, but he was down to continue making lifestyle content with Myka. 


According to their now defunct website, the Stauffer Life dot com, Myka and James wrote this about their back story


Our family journey on Youtube all started back in late 2012... right before our second child was born. Those first years of videos were a learning opportunity and our way of sharing our daily lives as a family with you and the world. Youtube for us is a way of life; a method of documenting life's challenges and victories as a family. It is also a way for our children to remember their childhood and the adventures they went on. This journey we are all on is truly magical and by sharing ours with you, we hope to inspire others to embrace each and every day to the fullest. We all have a story to tell and this is our way of doing it.


If they were really looking to make youtube a way for their children to remember their childhood and the adventures they went on like their website claimed, this seemed like a strange albeit lucrative way to do it. Myka was posting everything to youtube, including things that wouldn’t have been discussed with her children, like journey with pregnancy, her cleaning routines, and giving birth. Her videos were brightly lit, colorful, and focused on her journey building her family, heavily featuring her children. And weight loss companies… which seemed to be the biggest sponsors of Myka’s videos at this time. 

But her hard work was paying off. By 2014, Myka was doing Youtube full time, while James stayed at his job. 

youtube is a funny beast, though. When you’re creating content for youtube, you’re really creating content for an algorithm. If you don’t, your videos wont get pushed out to people, you’ll lose sponsors, and well, in Myka’s case, you’d have to go back to your nursing job.


So everything about the videos must be optimized for the algorithm. Thumbnails need to feature bright, cheery faces so they get clicked, the content needs to be dramatic, and the titles need to be eye catching.


It seems that to stand out amongst a sea of other kids and family content, some families have tried to go for shock value.  Take for instance the LaBrant family. Another, shockingly blonde, young family with 5 kids. In 2021, a video with a thumbnail featuring their children at the time was posted to youtube with the title “She got diagnosed with Cancer”.  In the thumbnail, the dad is looking down at his youngest daughter.


Millions of concerned fans tuned in to the 42 minute video devastated for their family, only to learn in the first 10 minutes that their daughter, did not- in fact -have cancer. The video was referring to the fact that some other children have cancer. The title and thumbnail were some twisted form of clickbait to hit the algorithm. Needless to say fans were not happy and the comments are now turned off on that video.


But Myka was in this same predicament, how could she use the algorithm to her advantage to get her content to grow. Well, in family content, one thing the algorithm loves is  family milestones. Most family youtubers seem to get their biggest engagement when they’re announcing something big, like a pregnancy journey they’re going to take their audience on, or in the Labrants case, when they make everyone think their child is being diagnosed with an illness.  


So on July 6th, 2016, Myka announced a very big milestone that she would be documenting for her audience.


Now, with three children in tow, she and James were looking at adding more to their family by means of adoption. 


In a video titled “BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!!! | Baby #4 Myka Stauffer, (a title which seemed to be primed for search engine optimization), Myka and James sit on the couch holding a nearly naked infant, and tell their audience they are going to be adopting a little boy from China. No, they hadn’t officially started the process, but they wanted to share that they had well…. Decided to start the process. 


Myka had always wanted to adopt after having three kids, she said,  but she decided that it was necessary for her to adopt a child with special needs. 


And this became part of the Stauffer’s content upload cycle. Videos of every. Single. Detail of their journey to adopt a young boy from China. In one video, Myka announces that she “stumbled upon” an adoption site that featured a boy who “stole their heart.” 


I’m going to refer to this boy as H. Yes, his name is out there, but so many personal details have been shared about this poor kid with out consideration for him that I just can’t bring myself to name him. 


Myka explains in one video, that she was told by the adoption agency that H was special needs. It was explained that he most likely had a small brain tumor, but that he would be completely functional and had the potential to live a fairly normal life. 


All in all, there were 27 videos about their adoption journey including a specific 13 part series answering questions, sharing their emotions and at times fundraising money for H’s special needs without explicitly detailing how the donated money would be used.. For every 5 dollars donated Myka would show another sliver of a “1,000 piece puzzle” that would eventually show a complete picture of H’s face. Donors names would also be written in H’s baby book.

This tactic of ‘breadcrumbing’ exclusive content of children for paid followers is not unique to the Stauffers. In fact, it’s something that probably happens more today than it did in 2016. In 2021, a tik tokker named Zoe Laverne was offering exclusive photos of her newborn to her 21 million followers for a $15 fee. 


Then there was the case of Hannah Naeli (naylee) , who ran a social media channel on behalf of her 12 year old daughter who wanted to be an actress.


Hannah was offering tons of exclusive access to her daughter via different channels. A patreon was set up with tiers ranging from 8 dollars to 100 dollars, and offered exclusive pictures of her daughter. There also was a $125.25 "Gold VIP" package that sold media featuring Naeli's daughter and another girl. The tier included "50+ exclusive pics of us having a blast" and "15 videos of dancing, swimming and other fun activities." There were no laws in California where the account was run at the time preventing her mother from doing this. 


So, after the paid puzzle of H was confirmed he started appearing in videos on the families channel, with the Stauffer Family channel’s “adoption day” video garnering over 5 million views. I told you, youtube loves big milestones. 


After this, 4 year old H is a staple in videos for the family, he’s brought into the fold just like the other children.


Only, there’s something deeply sinister about H’s involvement in these videos, pretty much right off the bat. It becomes apparent early on to the Stauffer’s and to the audience that his disabilities are affecting his life more than the adoption agency disclosed.

He would bite the family and bang his head against the wall. He was prone to melt downs that concerned doctors. And he had trouble communicating, meaning he couldn’t really say what he was feeling. About how comfortable he was, about being filmed, any of it. 


And these challenges were being broadcast to an ever growing audience, though Myka insisted there were details she left out of the videos, it felt like every piece of information doctors told the Stauffers, she was telling the audience. Like how The Stauffer’s brought the young boy in for more testing and were told that he did not have a brain tumor, he actually had a stroke in utero. In one video where Myka and James wear sweat suits and talk directly to camera, they explain that H was diagnosed with “severe autism”. 

Think about it, if your doctor went on youtube and made a video about you to an audience of 700,000 subscribers and told them your personal medical history, they’d be fired. But that protection, HIPPA, doesn’t apply to parents.


Earlier this year we saw the fallout of this, when an 18 year old who asked to go by “Cam”, testified in support of a Maryland bill protecting children forced into influencing. In that testimony, Cam shared that their mother was a social media influencer who shared deeply personal and intimate details about Cam to her followers, including Cam’s first period. Cam is now terrified to go by their real name, because a cursory google search would amass hundreds of photos of them as a child. 


H never had the chance to speak out about this though, so videos documenting his progress continued. Myka would hop on camera and complain about the difficulties that came with raising the boy, and would try to show her audience her methods for disciplining him. 


And her audience, and brands, ate up the content. In one photo posted to instagram, Myka is cuddling H while a basket of laundry sits behind them. In it, a detergent is strategically placed with its label forward. The caption indicated it was a sponsored post. Under another sponsored photo she wrote that the detergent had actually helped her relationship with H grow. 


The oversharing was packaged as authenticity to help other families, so it seemed really suspicious to followers, when H started slowly disappearing from the Stauffer’s youtube videos sometime around February of 2020. 


By April, fans noticed that his car seat is no longer in Jame’s car, causing a lot of concern. 


Finally, on May 26, Myka uploaded a video to the Stauffer Life channel titled “an update from our family”. In it, Myka and James look somber in their well lit master bedroom. They explain to the camera that they made the decision to give H to a family better equipped to handle his specific needs. 

They go on to say that they still loved H “with every ounce of their being


They ask at the end of the video that their privacy be respected at this time.


It’s ironic to ask for privacy at the end of a years long saga where they shared deeply personal details about their sons medical history with millions of strangers. When they put a camera in his face before he even could understand the idea of youtube. But this was the first time they would face any real backlash over their actions, so they were asking people to not criticize them, disguised as privacy.


This scandal immediately blew up, reaching an audience much larger than their own youtube subscribers. People were infuriated, and accused the Stauffers of adopting a child just to make content and money off of him. A petition demanding the family to un monetize videos featuring H reached 150 thousand signatures, and soon those videos with H in them were all made private. The family kept the rest of the videos up, until the backlash was so severe that The Stauffers Life, as well as Myka’s own channel, were voluntarily taken down. 


To accuse a family of adopting a special needs son from another country with the sole intention of monetizing him is a very severe accusation. Regardless of the family's intention, though, videos featuring H were incredibly profitable. 


It’s hard to guess exactly how much the Stauffer’s were making, youtube pays a different amount to every creator and it has changed a lot over the years. But in a pretty perverse video, Myka is laying on the beach telling her followers she was electing to get H cheaper therapy. One follower noted that the bracelet on her arm in the video was valued at over $6,000. 


H has been confirmed to be with a new loving family, and is currently doing well far away from the Stauffers. 


But this story really highlights the dangerous pipeline of family youtubers. The more their content stands out, the more views they get, the more money they bring in for their families, wash, rinse, repeat. In The Stauffers case, adopting a child and taking the audience on that journey really helped them stand out amongst their peers. But some channels choose other, extreme methods to stand out. 

Take for instance the now deleted daddy O Five Channel. 

Daddy O five was a very successful channel run by parents Heather and Michael Martin. The idea of the channel was to vlog and do fun family pranks on their 5 children and upload them to their 750,000 fans.


Heather was the step-mother to Michael’s children, but participated in the family vlogs and pranks and encouraged their creation. 


Pranks started out small, albeit strange. When I think of pranks, I think of silly, harmless things like putting seran wrap over a toilet or that one where you call your mom on Thanksgiving and ask how long you need to microwave a turkey for. I don’t know, silly dumb stuff that doesn’t hurt anyone. 


But the DaddyOFive pranks weren’t that. The pranks typically consisted of the parents angrily accusing one of their children of something until the child was very upset, and then laughing at them and telling them they were only kidding. 


In one earlier video, Michael accuses his daughter, who looks under 10 in the videos, of kissing boys at school. When she gets upset, he pushes harder, yelling at her that her brothers saw her doing it. 


The young girl starts shrieking, saying that she wasn’t doing that, that her brothers were lying, until her father tells her he was just kidding. Yea I don’t really see how that’s a “prank”, it’s not funny or enjoyable to watch, and yet their channel kept growing. 


Over time, Heather and Michael realized that the more intense the pranks got, and the more upset their children seemed, the more views they'd get. But here’s the thing. Views weren’t just coming from fans, at this point, other youtubers started making videos calling out DaddyOFive for their behavior, but that brought more people to their channel, who would watch in horror and comment their concerns, thus adding to the videos engagement and driving views. 


Michael admitted in one video that his daughter's reactions weren’t extreme enough for his liking. 


 In one prank video, you can hear Michael explain to two of his young sons that they needed to make sure to “keep it going, get her as mad as you can possibly get her”. It was clear he was trying to heighten her reactions so they aligned better with his vision for the channel. However, she remained pretty stoic and so he stopped featuring her as much.


And unfortunately for Michael’s youngest son, a lot of the focus was then turned to him. 


I’m going to take a second right now to just let you know that the youngest son now lives with his biological mom and is safe. She’s confirmed that he is doing well, just keep that in mind as we continue.


So, the youngest had been diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which is described as “a frequent and ongoing pattern of anger, irritability, arguing and defiance toward parents and other authority figures. ODD also includes being spiteful and seeking revenge, a behavior called vindictiveness”.


The little boy was prone to intense and emotional breakdowns. He needed tools and resources to handle his emotions, but instead, he was given a camera in his face.


Michael seemed to love his son’s outbursts, they were the exact emotional response he was looking for to his pranks. And by this time, other creators on youtube were making even more videos calling out the behavior of DaddyOfive. It was no longer a secret that the channel was abusing their children for views,


But this all crescendoed in a video called INVISIBLE INK PRANK! (EPIC MELTDOWN). Yes, his sons behavior disorder was used for SEO don’t even get me started.



In the video, Heather holds a small bottle of black ink, which is labeled as invisible ink,  up to the camera, and says she’s going prank Michael’s youngest with it. She proceeds to dump the contents of the bottle on the carpet, and the black ink makes these horrible stains on his otherwise white floor. It looks terrible, I have no idea why anyone would make a mess like that intentionally.


then she and Michael call the boy into the room, camera positioned perfectly to get his reaction, and they start screaming at him. What is this, what happened, they yell at the boy, who looks shocked. Not only is his floor ruined, but he has no idea what happened. He starts getting emotional, a completely warranted reaction in this scenario, but Heather and Michael keep heightening their anger, swearing at the boy.


Soon, another one of their sons and their daughter are in the room, having come to the youngests aid, and they’re all crying, unsure what’s happening and why their parents are so mad. 


Eventually, when all the kids are distraught and comforting each other, heather and michael break out into a fit of maniacal laughter. “It’s just a prank brah” michael sneers at his son, who is not laughing. 


This video horrified hundreds of thousands of viewers, and eventually caught the attention of the mainstream media who went public with the story. In 2017, Heather and Michael were sentenced to five years probation and lost custody of two of their children, including the youngest son. And like I said, he lives with his biological mother now, and she says he’s healing.  DaddyOFive have been banned from Youtube.


I’d like to say that the Stauffers and DaddyOFive are relics of the past, of a time where content creation involving children was a lawless place. But the sad reality is that it is STILL very much a lawless place and these issues continue to crop up. 



Currently, at the federal level, children have “zero protections in regard to their privacy, labor, or income” from online content. The laws that do exist regarding kids and the internet, like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and Children's Internet Protection Act In the US, focus on illegal data collection and exposing obscene content to minors, not the acts of their own family members.  Influencing is a completely unregulated 16 billion-plus dollar industry, as opposed to other areas, like entertainment, where child labor is strictly monitored



The highest earners can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars from  views alone on YouTube, before hundreds of thousands more in brand deals; this income is controlled by their parents.


This is different from Child actors, who are protected in some states by something called the Coogan act. The bill strictly enforces the amount of hours a child can work and school hours that have to be completed which depends on their age — in CA and NY, infants can only be on set for 2 hours/work for 20 minutes, while a 6-8 year can be on set for 8 hours/work for 4 hours when school is still in session, 6 hours when school is out. The Coogan Trust requires 15% of a child actor’s income to be put away in a blocked trust in their name that can’t be accessed until they turn 18 years old.


But the Coogan act hasn’t been updated to apply to youtube. Families can make content with their children for unlimited hours and pocket all of the money for themselves. H, who was heavily featured in profitable youtube videos, who’s medical history was the subject of ad sponsored videos, is not guaranteed any of the money from them. And he needs it the most.


There are a few states this year that are making a little headway. Last August, Illinois passed a law that would ensure financial compensation for children under 16 years old featured in video blogs. It JUST went into effect this July.  A similar bill was introduced in California. The states of Maryland and Pennsylvania are considering legislation around children in online content. But it’s slow, and it’s not a sweeping federal legislation. It varies state to state. 

So I would say it’s only a matter of time until we have another Stauffer or Daddy O’ Five situation on our hands. There’s a lot of money to be made in the family content space, and I don’t think people are going to just leave it on the table. 


But, we can be mindful of the content we consume. If something feels wrong, you can block creators. People only make money when we watch things, so use your best judgement out there.


And remember, everything is controlled by an algorithm. When you watch and interact with content, it fuels it. 


But this is not to put the onus on us, we’re not the ones doing this. Laws need to be put in place


Kaelyn Moore
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