YouTuber Myka Stauffer and husband James have become engulfed in controversy over their decision to “rehome” their adopted son, who is developmentally disabled and on the autism spectrum.
The couple has been hit with backlash, leading them to defend their decision while explaining how difficult it was to make. However, she claimed there had been incidents that placed their other children at risk.
Another couple who faced similar issues and made the same decision are coming forward to offer support, telling their story on a video they shared on YouTube.
In a video posted last week, by Karen and Joe Bartling — who have adopted six blind children — explain that adoption dissolution is actually not that uncommon.
RELATED: YouTube Star Myka Stauffer Offers More Insight After Backlash For ‘Rehoming’ Adopted Son
According to Joe, it actually takes place about 25 per cent of the time in “international adoptions of kids older than 2 or 3,” according to statistics.
“It happens more often than people think,” he says, adding that “social workers are not trained to assist through that process” and that parents are often left to their own devices in wondering how to “get support” after the “honeymoon phase” of bringing home a new child.
This is particularly true when that child has special needs that the adoptive parents may not be equipped to handle.
“The reality of what happens with your family, you friends, your church supports… whatever you think is in place to help you through this, they’re gone,” says Karen, with Joe adding that “they disappear, as soon as little Johnny starts yelling and screaming or having a meltdown, or disrupting a church service and things like that.”
Ultimately, he explains, this forces the parents toward a painful decision. “So the agency’s not helping, your normal support systems are not helping, and yet the desperation to a family comes in… that doubt comes in that that child may or may not be a good fit [for the family],” Joe says. “And that’s a heart-wrenching kind of situation.”
In the video, they reveal that they found new homes for two children they adopted.
In one case, she says, they were “way deep in over our heads” when an 8-year-old girl was placed in their home, which led to “professional after professional coming to us with another bad report and another bad report, and the behaviours were off the charts … [we] felt that we were not the right people to parent this child.”
Admitting that “it was like living a nightmare,” Karen said they made the “heart-wrenching” decision to place the little girl into another home seven weeks after she joined their household.
Their message: don’t judge. “You can’t judge someone’s parenting based on a decision that they made, because disruption in adoption does happen, and it happens a lot,” she adds.
