When it comes to learning how to best encourage and support my young autistic son, I still have lots to learn.
But the recent news of YouTuber/Instagrammer Myka Stauffer and her husband “rehoming” their autistic child “because it wasn’t clear how many issues he had” makes me want to vomit.
Because here’s the biggest thing every parent of an autistic child should know: Autistic kids don’t need to be fixed. There is nothing wrong with being autistic.
There is something wrong, however, with parents trying to turn their autistic kids “normal.”
Whatever that means.
In this particular case, it seems the child didn’t fit into the sparkly Instagram life the Stauffers plastered all over the internet.
And so this autistic child — toddler, really — who’d already been torn away from one home got torn away from his second, supposedly permanent, home and family.
Worst of all, the Stauffers in their “apology” video talk about how this past year, Huxley spent a lot of time in intensive therapy: applied behavior analysis (ABA).
Some autistic adults are grateful for their ABA experience, but many others are not. It is a grueling, 20 to 40 hours per week of therapy that essentially aims to remove a child’s autistic behaviors to make them fit in, or appear more normal.
The doctor who diagnosed my son with autism prescribed ABA, but I ripped that piece of paper up after reading autistic perspectives on it. I did not want to put my son through 40 hours of conversion therapy each week. Worse, ABA was created by a man who abused children and didn’t consider autistic people to be people at all. His view that autism is a problem to be driven out of a child is still prevalent today.
But it’s not a problem. According to the Autism Self Advocacy Support Network, “Autism is a developmental disability that affects how we experience the world around us. Autistic people are an important part of the world. Autism is a normal part of life, and makes us who we are.”
It’s a disability, it’s normal, and it’s valuable. It’s an integral part of a neurodiverse world.
Autistic kids may need extra support to help them navigate life in their own unique and valuable way, but the last thing they need is to be turned “non-autistic.”
From the videos the Stauffers have posted on their various platforms, they appear to view autism as a problem to solve. And since they couldn’t solve Huxley’s autism, they abandoned the child who had it.
Watching the video of the two tearfully defending this abandonment lit a fire in me. They talked about their pain, their grief. They even appear to place the responsibility for the “rehoming” in Huxley’s hands, saying the 4-year-old wanted it.
I can’t stop thinking about this sweet child. In the few videos I’ve watched since last week, he reminds me so much of my autistic son, who also sucks his thumb and has unique ways of connecting and showing his emotions, and who would have terrible meltdowns if I belittled his feelings, the way Myka and James Stauffer do in several video clips on the internet.
See, like many people, I dug deeper. I found a video of Myka and her husband filming Huxley supposedly after a “terrible” meltdown. “Are you done?” Myka asks in the video, smacking her gum. “Are you over yourself?”
In a still from another video, we see Huxley with his hand duct-taped, allegedly to prevent him from sucking his thumb. The video from the same moment shows Myka commanding Huxley to look her in the eye — a painful experience for many autistic people.
In yet another video from before the adoption, Myka openly talks about how they were told little Huxley would have special needs. She literally says, “My child is not returnable. So when I heard all the things the doctor was telling us, it kind of went in one ear and out the other… No matter what state he came to us, we would love him.”
It appears this was only true as long as it served the Stauffers’ selfish desires — like the many monetized YouTube videos and Instagram ads that featured Huxley, his special needs, and his adoption process.
I hope the Stauffers are made to pay Huxley back all the money he made them.
I hope this child is truly somewhere where he feels loved, where he spends a little bit of time in therapy that encourages him but does not try to make him into someone he’s not.
Most of all, I hope his new mother loves him unconditionally. I hope she values all his attempts at communication, no matter how loud and frustrated they might be. I hope she shows him that all his emotions are acceptable.
And that like all autistic and neurodivergent children, he is beautiful just the way he is.
