Family Vlogging Is a Lucrative Industry. This Max Docuseries Asks If It Should Be
In 2019, Myka Stauffer was the voice behind a fairly successful family vlogging channel. She posted about her husband, children, and parenting journey to close to 700,000 subscribers on YouTube and with support from major brands like Pampers, Walmart, and Fabletics. No topic was off limits, so when she adopted a son from China, she brought viewers along through the lengthy journey. Then one day in 2019, her son Huxley disappeared from videos altogether, prompting a tidal wave of questions from fans and eventually sparking a scandal that ended her career online entirely. For the average poster, Stauffer’s story was a cautionary tale about the dilemmas of monetizing access — you want people to watch, but you can’t control when they won’t look away. But when documentary director Rachel Mason first read about influencer Myka Stauffer and her fall from internet grace, it catapulted her headfirst into the detailed and highly controversial sphere of family vlogging.
“I read this article by Caitlin Moscatello [in The Cut] and thought, ‘Wow, this is unbelievable,’” Mason tells Rolling Stone. “I’d never heard about this world. And I dove right in because I wanted to know as much as I possibly could.”
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That interest has become Mason’s newest docuseries, An Update on Our Family, which premieres Wednesday, Jan. 15, on Max and takes a direct look at the career of family vlogging through the lens of the Stauffers. (The couple did not participate in the show and did not respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.) Like the name suggests, family vlogging is a genre of content where families gain followers (and extra income) by posting videos about their lives and interactions. Family vlogging began growing in popularity in the early 2010s and has since become a staple of digital platforms. But as posting about kids has grown into a legitimate industry online, so has discourse about the ethics of turning children into their families’ breadwinners.
An Update on Our Family sets its interrogation of the family vlogging industry amid a recap of the Stauffers’ rise online. Myka met her husband, James, on OkCupid, according to her early videos, around 2014. After announcing their pregnancy in 2012, the couple moved to Indianapolis and Stauffer, who had previously posted mostly about her weight-loss journey, began sharing videos about their marriage vlogs on their new channel, “The Stauffer Life.” After giving birth to their first child, Myka grew in popularity for her YouTube vlogs detailing their ongoing fertility journey to have a large family. The more children they had — totaling two daughters and one son — the more subscribers they gained.
In 2016, Myka and James announced they had decided to adopt a child from China. They kept their audience informed throughout the adoption, gaining thousands of followers in the process. But when they returned home with a young son, whom they named Huxley, Myka quickly began detailing how their adoption journey was less than idyllic. Huxley had a difficult time adjusting; Myka and James posted that he had medical issues, constant tantrums, and was diagnosed as possibly autistic or developmentally delayed. And after Huxley disappeared from the family’s vlogs for months, it took a wave of concern from viewers to have them finally address the truth: The Stauffers sent Huxley to an undisclosed new family.
“There’s not an ounce of our body that doesn’t love Huxley with all of our being,” Myka said through tears in their video announcing the child’s departure in 2020. “There wasn’t a minute that I didn’t try our hardest, and I think what Jim is trying to say is that after multiple assessments, after multiple evaluations, numerous medical professionals have felt that he needed a different fit and that his medical needs, he needed more.” It was the end of the Stauffers’ family vlogging career.
“As the industry has matured, I think a lot more people are just looking around and being like, ‘Hey, shouldn’t we regulate this?’”
Stephanie McNeal is a senior editor at Glamour and the author of Swipe Up for More, a book about the business behind influencers. (She’s also interviewed in the documentary.) She tells Rolling Stone that the backlash to the Stauffers’ decision and roles in posting their children’s lives paralleled an already growing concern over the exploitation inherent in family-based influencer channels.
“In the beginning, there [were] only a couple of people who were talking about the fact that this isn’t a fictional TV series. These are real kids, and this is their real life, and ‘Hey, what’s that going to be like when they’re older?’” McNeal says. “As the industry has matured, I think a lot more people are just looking around and being like, ‘Hey, shouldn’t we regulate this?’”
Mason tells Rolling Stone it was imperative to discuss just how exploitative people believe the family vlogging industry to be. But she also wanted to make sure the documentary didn’t add to the problem. That’s why An Update on Our Family never shows the face of a child, choosing to blur them out, even in footage that still exists on social media.
“This series had to distinguish itself from the content that we’re looking at. We want to make sure we are able to speak to the profound discomfort and ethical questions of working with children, and allow ourselves that ability to say we’re not participating in the exposing of these children,” Mason says. “They’re not our children. So we want to make sure that we’re protecting them from the scrutiny that can come from our show.”
An Update on Our Family takes its time to detail just when audiences turned against the Stauffers and their daily videos. But as people continue to confront how family vlogs have continued to remain popular, a clear sticking point remains. The ethical problems with family vlogging have already been exposed. Fans accused Myka of making money off of her adoptive child, but even after Stauffers left YouTube, other family channels thrived. Ruby Franke, the mom behind the YouTube channel 8 Passengers, pleaded guilty in a Utah court to abusing and starving two of her children. Vlogging snark channels — subreddits dedicated to exposing the behavior of popular family influencers — have continued to rise in popularity, too. But if each new story tells a worse side effect of family vlogging, to no avail, is there really anything that could hold the industry accountable?
“The industry has the potential to be really harmful to children and it’s been hard to get momentum behind the idea that these are kids who need to be protected,” McNeal adds. “And I think that [Myka] was a huge example of a thing that could have been an inflection point — and ultimately wasn’t.”
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