Eighteen-year-old Nadine Lauffer has become part of a movement of homeschooling families who are debunking myths surrounding the community. With her weekly podcasts, she’s also been helping teens homeschool fearlessly through high school.
Ms. Lauffer, currently based in Pennsylvania, spent years growing up in the Netherlands and Florida as her dad used to work in chemical engineering sales.
At the age of 3, she began her educational journey at a Dutch-speaking school. However, when her family moved to Florida, she had to restart kindergarten since she didn’t know any English but successfully overcame that challenge.
Ms. Lauffer attended a public school until the fourth grade when her parents decided to make the switch to homeschooling.
Sharing the reasons for the move with The Epoch Times, she said: “The first thing was that our school was getting incredibly overpopulated. We lived next to the third fastest growing community in the nation at the time, so they could not build schools fast enough to keep up with the amount of students moving there.”
With the size of classes growing, Ms. Lauffer and her sister weren’t able to get enough personal attention from their teachers.
At church, the Lauffer family was acquainted with a homeschooling family and found the personalities of their kids to be positive.
“The teenagers,” she said, “were very different from the normal teenagers that I'd met coming from the public school system. They were more attentive, they knew how to talk to adults, and they were joyful.”
Thus, when their church created a co-op for homeschooling families, the Lauffer family opted in, taking a better turn for their children’s education.
Initially, Ms. Lauffer, who was entering fifth grade, wasn’t too thrilled about the idea of homeschooling. She was looking forward to a lot of exciting things and was surrounded by her friends at school.
However, she didn’t contest her parents’ decision as she knew they had her best interests at heart.
Embarking on her homeschooling journey, Ms. Lauffer noticed there was a great upside to being a homeschooler.
“We were home a lot more; I got to grow my relationship with my sister more than I ever would,” she said. “She is three grades behind me, so there would be no contact with her [in the public school] during the majority of my school year.”
Additionally, through her co-op, Ms. Lauffer made new friends in her community and enjoyed having her mother as her teacher.
As time passed by, Ms. Lauffer’s passion to learn and better herself grew organically.
“As you mature, you get to see the real blessings and benefits of what you’re doing,” she said.
With more time, she and her sister were able to pursue different opportunities such as learning and competing in music, athletics, and sports like soccer and volleyball.
Apart from extracurricular activities, Ms. Lauffer has seen homeschooling shape her personality and change her view of the world.
She became more independent. As she learned to self-educate, she noticed that the ability was a tool that helped her to think for herself.
“We’re not always constantly having a teacher tell us what to do every second, so we have to be in charge of the success and the mistakes we make,” she said.
Another quality she learned was tenacity. Homeschoolers have to work for many things, from the ground up.
“It’s something that we have to be patient with ourselves in order to fulfill,” she said, adding she has learned to persevere through the hard questions and find the answers herself.
Homeschooling has also helped build her confidence.
“We’re in an environment of people who know and love us the best and want the best for us,” Ms. Lauffer said. “And if you grow up in that, you see opportunities everywhere, and you’re confident in yourself because also you can reach far and then have a soft place to fall.”
Beyond just her personal development, homeschooling has also helped her strengthen her faith, and that’s something she is grateful for.
“I’ve been able to see God in everything I do, especially my education, [and] the world in general,” Ms. Lauffer said.
However, her homeschooling journey hasn’t always been smooth. In ninth and 10th grade, she struggled with the fear of missing out and didn’t enjoy homeschooling as much.
During that period, Ms. Lauffer pondered what her life would have looked like if she had been in a public school. However, she had two experiences that helped change her perspective and made her happy to have stuck with homeschooling.
The first was an interaction with a group of six girls from public school—at a youth camp—who shared their daily struggles with Ms. Lauffer.
“[They were] just talking about their daily struggles in school and the amount of bullying that they see,” she said.
Ms. Lauffer was shocked to learn about the depression rate and hear about school vandalism.
This got her thinking about her education compared to her peers from public school who had to focus more on getting through the day rather than delving into learning.
“It’s not that we shouldn’t learn how to face hard things,” Ms. Lauffer said. “As homeschoolers, we experience a lot of hard things; we’re not removed from the world. But I feel like a lot of that was unnecessary.”
The second experience was when she heard a speech by Andrew Pudewa, founder and director of the Institute for Excellence in Writing.
“He was talking about homeschooling in a way that I‘d never heard before, saying it’s not supposed to be public school from home,” Ms. Lauffer said, adding that she’d found herself getting stuck in the same pattern for the preceding two years.
However, on listening to his words, Ms. Lauffer was encouraged to go through her high school experience in a way that fit her and to focus on her love of learning rather than trying to mimic what was going on in public schools.
With her audience limited to homeschooling teens, she remains focused on encouraging them while dispelling stereotypes that surround the community.
Through her podcasts, she’s been able to communicate with many homeschoolers and their families, giving her a good idea of where the homeschooling community is heading.
Although Ms. Lauffer has come to the end of her homeschooling education, she will always remain a homeschooling ambassador. The high school graduate is now preparing for her freshman year at Grove City College.
In sharing her story, she hopes to encourage others on their own homeschooling journeys and implores, “You’re not alone.”
