Tears shimmering in their eyes, – or cascading down their weary faces – new parents hug the children they’ve travelled miles and waited hours to meet, take home, and welcome into their new family.
They cry, they clutch children to their chests, and declare how they can’t believe the big day is finally here… all to a camera held aloft by a well-trained selfie-taking arm or a YouTube husband.
These are ‘gotcha days’, shared in their thousands on YouTube and pulling in millions of views from people around the globe who comment that they, too, are weeping along with the new parents finally bringing their adopted children home.
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It’s tricky to say exactly how the ‘gotcha day’ video went mainstream. The term – which is used both for adopting animals and children – has been in use since 2001 at least, when it was mentioned in Primary Care Pediatrics as a day to celebrate alongside a child’s birthday, and has seen a gentle incline on Google search trends since 2016.
Though both the concept and the sharing of gotcha days has been criticised and questioned, on Youtube these videos have found an accepting home where they receive millions of views.
But gotcha videos – the phenomenon of filming the moment you take home an adopted child and sharing it to YouTube – are just one small part of the massive YouTube subculture of adoption stories.
A cursory search of ‘adopting’ on YouTube will deliver thousands of videos capturing adoption from all angles, from parents announcing their plans to adopt and families documenting the ins and outs of the adoption process to those who have made a name for themselves sharing regular vlogs featuring their many adopted children.
There’s a huge world of adoption YouTubers – whose videos can bring in immense numbers of views.
One of the biggest fish in the adoption pond is ItsRLife, with 1.2million subscribers tuning in to watch videos from the family of seven; two of whom are adopted.
Their channel includes videos titled ‘Adopting A Teen!’ (6million views at time of writing), ‘Hampton’s Adoption Story’ (231,000 views), ‘GETTING THE CALL! PICKING UP OUR BABY SON!’ (147,000 views), and ‘Why I Will Never Give Up My Special Needs Adopted Child! Our response to Myka Stauffer’ (419,000 views), many of which tick off the tropes of the adoption video genre, from the emphasis on the ‘gotcha’ and ‘finally meeting’ moments to the thumbnails showing emotional hugs and fingers dabbing at teary eyes.
Others who’ve made adopted family stories their focus include Crazy Pieces (a family with ten children, seven of whom are adopted), Crazy Middles (18 adopted children), This Gathered Nest, and The Miller Fam.
Going down the avenue of sharing the emotional highs and lows of adoption – especially the moment of arrival – can bring in more than just hundreds of thousands of video views. This particular type of content can also prove immensely lucrative.
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Based on the number of views their videos receive, their subscriber base, and the ad sense platform on YouTube, Jack Cooper, PR expert at EdHopkinsPR, estimates that ItsRLife is earning £400,000 to £500,000 a year from their YouTube alone, while Crazy Pieces could be earning £300,000 a year and Crazy Middles could be earning £200,000 a year.
Jack says that just one ‘gotcha day’ video could pull in thousands in earnings. One that receives 6 million views, like ItsRLife’s did, could earn the maker £23,052.
‘The overwhelming number of video views prove that there’s a huge financial incentive for talking about adoption and showing your life at home,’ says Ben Philips, a social media expert and money insider.
That’s before you delve into the world of additional sponsorship deals outside of YouTube, which large channels can use to up their earnings.
‘There is always going to be a huge market for these types of YouTubers because the world finds adoption fascinating and wants to follow the adoption journey,’ says Jack, who explains that this type of content allows brands to engage with parents and people over 35, an audience ‘that isn’t normally targeted’, making these channels an appealing prospect for collaboration.
But where there’s an opportunity to make money, there’s potential for exploitation.
Vlogs focusing on family life bring up large questions around ethics, which only get more complex when the adoption process is added into the mix.
YouTube does not have a blanket rule that bans people from profiting off videos of their children, but it does have a number of policies in place that aim to keep the subjects of this content safe.
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YouTube says that ‘the presence of a minor does not automatically exclude the video from monetisation capabilities’, but that they ‘do not allow the exploitation of children’, which includes ‘sexualisation, acts of violence, vulgarity and harassment/bullying, among other content’.
‘If a video violates our policies, we immediately remove its ability to monetise,’ they say.
While there’s absolutely financial motivation for making content around adoption, it would be unfair to say that adoptive parents choose to share videos of their children – along with the adoption process – only because of their money-making potential.
Justin McClure, adopted the twin daughters of his partner, Ami, and together they created The Mighty McClures, a YouTube channel that has more than 1.7million subscribers.
The channel regularly provides updates of the twins’ daily lives, and in 2018 posted a video of Justin explaining to Alexis and Ava that they are adopted.
The channel has been immensely successful, but while Justin and Ami are conscious of creating entertaining content for their subscribers, they see the decision to document their children online as an act of love.
‘It’s kind of like a yearbook,’ Justin tells Metro.co.uk. ‘It’s kind of like when you look back through photos. I want to do that in videos.
‘If my kids look back and they see all these videos, and they’re put together well, they’re gonna be like, “Wow, my parents must have really loved me because why would they make these thoughtful videos?”.
‘They’re gonna look back at our videos and say, “my mom and dad really enjoyed our family, because they made these really nice videos for all of us to have forever”.
‘We get to give entertainment to other people, but we also get to document our own lives together.’
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For Jordan Svancara, 29, sharing videos of her experience of adoption is an effort to educate and inform.
Jordan, who works as a technical architect in Missouri and does YouTube as a hobby, has shared stories of adopting her one-year-old daughter with videos titled ‘Birth Vlog | Adoption Day of Our Baby Girl | EMOTIONAL Adoption Journey’ and ‘Surprise Adoption Announcement To Family | A Birth Mom Chose Us!!! Adoption Journey’.
‘I originally started my channel to talk about infertility and fertility treatments,’ Jordan says. ‘Once we went down the adoption path, I was learning so much and found many people’s view of adoption was outdated. My channel, which I was already using to educate women on fertility treatments and miscarriage, became a platform to show people what modern day adoption looks like.’
The motivations to share are similar for Melissa MacDonald, who is in the process of adopting and sharing the lessons she learns along the way.
‘It’s hard to find a lot of helpful information on adoption so we want to talk about it and share as much as we can,’ Melissa tells us. ‘Sharing also helps normalise the conversation about adoption and that is a good thing. We want others to see that there is a need for adoptive parents out there and if we can do it, you can do it.’
For now, Melissa is open to sharing anything and everything, but this will change when she and her partner welcome their adopted baby into their home. For all the parents we spoke to who share adoption stories online, privacy concerns and the ethics of consent are ever-present issues to consider.
Along with restricting comments on videos involving children and restricting channels’ ability to livestream, YouTube prompts anyone uploading content involving children to understand their legal obligations, including abidance with child labour laws.
Anyone making monetisable videos involving children must ensure that they have a permit if necessary, that a share of revenue is provided to the children (or set this aside for the future), that filming content does not interfere with their education, and that the working environment and hours are safe for the child.
But beyond these clear legal requirements, things get a touch murky, in the moral sense.
To deal with this, creators posting about children and adoption will often have personal ‘rules’ for what they do and don’t share.
‘I make sure that nothing we share is about the specifics of our daughter’s birth mother’s situation,’ says Jordan. ‘As my platform is more about education about adoption it is often more helpful for me to generalize and talk about the whole spectrum of adoption rather than focusing on our specific case.
‘Since we are so public with our adoption, it adds an extra layer of caution.
‘I don’t want anyone to be able to piece together information I have accidently revealed to be able to track down her birth mother since that is a huge breach of privacy and would be very traumatic for everyone.’
For the McClure family, considering the twins’ feelings is the priority.
When making the video of Justin explaining the twins’ adoption story, the parents ensured that this was not a surprise to the children that would catch them off guard – even if that may have been more of a dramatic watch.
Justin says: ‘If they’re seven, and I just sat them down, like “now girls, I gotta tell you something”, and I have a camera rolling, like, “girls, you’re adopted”, that would be very traumatic. If I put that online, that would not be a positive video.
‘[It’s about] being very, very thoughtful of the child and putting yourself in their situation and thinking about how would they take this news? And how would they feel about this being online?’
There’s the potential for sharing adoption stories online to go very, very wrong.
Earlier this year, YouTuber Myka Stauffer and her husband created a global shockwave when they announced on YouTube that they had rehomed their adopted son, Huxley.
Myka and James had produced 27 videos (the majority of which have since been made private) about their adoption journey, sharing every moment from the announcement that they planned to adopt a boy from China in 2016, to a video titled ‘Huxley’s EMOTIONAL adoption VIDEO!! GOTCHA DAY China adoption’, to the tearful message that Huxley was now with a ‘new forever family’.
Between 2016 and 2020, the couple had multiple sponsorship deals and ran ads on their videos, meaning they – sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly – earned money from content produced about the child they then gave away.
The backlash to Huxley’s rehoming was swift and strong, and the ramifications longlasting. Myka Stauffer has not posted on her YouTube or Instagram since an apology in June. The family’s channel has lost thousands of subscribers, and the Myka lost multiple commercial partnership deals.
The financial effect of this highly-publicised story of an adoption that just didn’t work out will have been huge, but it could pale in comparison to the emotional impact on all parties involved.
On a smaller scale, and even when adoption goes smoothly, there are still risks associated with sharing stories of adopted children online.
As views increase and popularity grows, children and parents may have to deal with people they know in ‘real’ life knowing everything that has been shared online – which can be a source of embarrassment and shame.
When you place children online, you allow them to be commented on – and the response isn’t always positive.
Jordan says that while the vast majority of comments she receive are supportive, she already receives messages from strangers criticising her choice to adopt.
After receiving comments claiming adoption is ‘baby stealing’, Jordan now moderates all comments on her channel, to ‘protect birth parents, adoptees, and adoptive parents’.
Even when comments on YouTube are moderated, however, it’s possible for viewers to share their opinions on the personal details of a family’s life on other forums, whether on Twitter or dedicated forums such as GuruGossiper and Tattle.Life.
The harsh truth is that anything you put online is able to be shared and dissected far beyond the small circle of people you might imagine – are the process of adoption and your adopted child themselves topics you want being discussed by critics, fans who think they know everything, and trolls?
‘These types of channels and videos are risky because there are lot of different opinions on adoption and the videos are allowing the world to see and judge how you are at being a parent,’ says Jack. ‘The viewers may not always agree with every personal decision being made, leading to a backlash on comments and having an impact on the channels name and the youtubers mental state.’
The dark side of online sharing is something any adoptive parent who’s thinking of filming their adoption journey needs to consider.
It’s easy to be drawn in to the allure of sharing videos of the happy moments – the moment you hug your child for the first time, their cheerful questions about how you became a family, all the cute interactions between your kids – but before you do, you have to ask questions about the difficult stuff, or at least be prepared to redraw those lines as they come up.
Where do you draw the line between what’s acceptable to share and what stays private? Do you feel comfortable making those decisions on behalf of a child who can’t consent? What will happen if your child tells you they don’t want to be filmed anymore? What if your adoption journey isn’t smooth-sailing?
Ben says that when it comes to creating successful – both in terms of viewership and money made – content about adopted children and the adoption process, ‘authenticity is key’; but this throws up a tricky balancing act between children’s needs and wishes, the eternally positive viewpoint brands want to see, and the no-holds-barred honesty viewers expect.
Is it really possible to share both ethically and honestly when it comes to children, adopted or not? What about when profit is involved?
As Justin says, it’s worth thinking ahead and imagining an adopted child looking back at the videos filmed and shared when they were too young to fully understand what was happening. What will they think about these moments being online? How will they feel?
‘I think you must be very careful as a prospective adoptive parent or adoptive parent not to cross over the line of sharing your story into sharing your child’s story,’ says Jordan.
‘I would say record everything and post minimally.
‘When it comes to posting adoptive parents really need to ask themselves, “Is this part of my story or theirs?”
‘Our daughter’s story is hers. We are just the custodians of it for now.’
Do you have a story to share?
Get in touch by emailing MetroLifestyleTeam@Metro.co.uk.
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Adoption Month
Adoption Month is a month-long series covering all aspects of adoption.
For the next four weeks, which includes National Adoption Week from October 14-19, we will be speaking to people who have been affected by adoption in some way, from those who chose to welcome someone else’s child into their family to others who were that child.
We’ll also be talking to experts in the field and answering as many questions as possible associated with adoption, as well as offering invaluable advice along the way.
If you have a story to tell or want to share any of your own advice please do get in touch at adoptionstories@metro.co.uk.
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