Family Youtube Channels are a New Kind of Unregulated Child Abuse
And they’re endangering more children than we could possibly imagine.
From Myka Stauffer to 8 Passengers — we’ve got a crisis on our hands.
If you’ve been paying attention to online news, you’ve likely heard one of these two Family Channel scandal stories recently.
The Stauffers and 8 Passengers are the most recent examples of family misconduct through YouTube content, but certainly not the first.
FamilyOFive was one of the first family channels on YouTube to get noticed for the wrong reasons — through videos pranking their kids, encouraging them to hit one another and blatant acts of verbal abuse, viewers were horrified. The parents, Heather and Michael Martin were ultimately charged and convicted in 2017 with 5 years probation for child neglect.
The Stauffers are the family who recently came under fire when they tried to secretly rehome their autistic, adopted son of two years, Huxley, hoping viewers wouldn’t notice. Of course, their followers did indeed notice he was no longer in videos, which resulted in a huge backlash from upset users who commented in floods on the poor treatment of Huxley, compared to his siblings (who were biological…