Kearney Kids Parenting Show
First Baptist Church Kearney’s very own Minister of Children, Abraham Leonard, interviews pastors and authors on the subject of parenting, seeking to learn from their insights. We hope and pray that this resource is transformative for your parenting!
Kearney Kids Parenting Show
Parenting: Dr. Camden Pulliam
Dr. Camden Pulliam is interviewed by Minister of Children, Abraham Leonard, on the topic of Parenting. Dr. Pulliam shares many of his educated and helpful insights with the world.
Hello,
SPEAKER_01:welcome to the Kearney Kids Parenting Show. I am your host, Abraham Leonard, Minister of Children at First Baptist Church Kearney. I am so glad that you have joined us. Welcome to the show, Dr. Camden Pulliam. Could you tell us a little bit about your family, your ministry, and just how you're doing?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah. My name's Camden Pulliam. I serve as Senior Vice President of Institutional Relations at Midwestern Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. I'm also one of the pastors at Northside Fellowship. We're a Southern Baptist church plant here in Kansas City, about 10 minutes from the seminary. And I teach at the seminary as well, so I'm a professor here. Yeah. So I love my life, love the work that I get to do. I'm married to Mallory. We've been married 15 years. We have three kids, Hudson, Hallie, and Brooks. They are almost 11 years old now in a month. 11 years old, 8 years old, and 5 years old. We are in a very fun stage before kids get to middle school, but after diapers. We have no diapers and none of the stuff that comes with middle school either. So it's a very fun stage with our kids. We love life with them. We have a brand new dog as of a couple months ago. I'm still deciding if I like that life being a dog owner, but the kids love it. So... you ask me how life is going, I'm probably going to talk about the dog and how terrible the dog is, but the kids are great. Not sure about the dog yet. So
SPEAKER_01:anyway, I remember we're having a great summer. I remember either my mom or dad convincing the other one that we should get a dog so that it will eat all the crumbs off the ground. And then it didn't end up actually eating any of the crumbs. It was kind of, you know, on edge about the crumbs. Does your dog kind of do a lot of the sweeping for
SPEAKER_00:you? At least? Yeah, she does more than sweeping. If we catch her in the wrong moment, she will be up on the table eating the hamburgers that we forgot to put away or something. That's funny. That's part of my ire, my frustration with this dog is that she's causing more problems than she's fixing. That's funny.
SPEAKER_01:Well, to start off, do you have any good parenting memories? Maybe one or a couple of your favorite parenting memories?
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:I have memories from my own parents, but I also have memories of my own kids and me being a parent. So, if it's okay, I'd love to share. Yeah, sharing both. Yeah. Yeah. First off, just parenting is such a wonderful journey, and it really is a wonderful invitation to know God more, to know His character more, because as parents... That's what we are. We are reflections of God the Father. In His triune essence, He is Father, Son, Spirit. So, there is something deeply God-like even about parenthood. You are getting to enter into something that is quite mystical and quite wonderful. It's mysterious. So, just as my introductory comments about parenthood, I would just say for any parents who would listen to this, What you're doing is very sober. What you're doing is extremely important, and what you're doing is quite godlike. To take care of another individual, it runs right into the heart of God. So my own parenting journey, as with all of us, is what our own parents were like. And I had two wonderful parents. I have two wonderful parents. My parents are both still alive, both solid believers. My mom and my dad, just wonderful, wonderful people. One of my favorite moments growing up, I was duck hunting with my dad. It's like 5.30 in the morning. And I'm probably seven or eight years old. I can't remember exactly how old I was. But if you've ever been duck hunting, you're out in a marsh that's three, four feet deep. And we're sitting there before daylight has broken. And we're in a layout boat. My dad and I are in a layout boat. And a layout boat is where you literally lay down in the boat. And when ducks come, you rise up and shoot. Well, I am... I am like laying more or less on top of my dad. We didn't have two boats. We had one boat and I'm small enough that I can kind of fit in between his legs, his straddled legs, and I'm laying down. So, if you know duck hunting, that means anytime a duck comes, my dad is raising that gun above my head and shooting it right above my head. That's essentially the situation we're talking about. But we're in this layout boat and I hear this sound, this kind of shushing sound, like shh. And I say, dad, do you hear that? I explained the sound to him and he says, I don't hear it. Give it 30 seconds. And I say, dad, there's a shushing sound, shh. I was like, do you hear that? He said, I don't hear it. And then sure enough, 20 seconds later, it's like, that is a loud sound. And he's like, I hear that. And then all of a sudden we hit the floor of the marsh. Like our boat has been taking on water this whole time. The sound I was hearing was water coming into our boat. Oh, wow. We just hit the marsh. So it's like, you know, 38 degrees. We are soaking wet. It's terrible. So my dad starts piling up all of our gear on top of me.
UNKNOWN:I'm
SPEAKER_00:eight years old can barely get my head above water. And I've got all this gear. And I remember my dad taking this, this layout boat and raising it above his head with all this water, just pouring down on him, getting all of the water out of this boat. And it is like a core memory of mine, watching my dad get all the gear, get all the gear out of the boat, holding it all. And then just watching him hoist this boat above his head. I don't know why it's a core memory of mine. I don't even know what symbolic meaning it has. But in that moment, I saw my dad get to work immediately in the midst of a crisis, not complain, be a man among men, do what has to be done. And then we just start hiking out of the marsh. We're going to go get dry. But never once did he complain. He had a happy heart. It's become a core memory. And I think that just making memories with your kids, doing stuff that's supposed to be fun that turns out to be a crisis, but you make fun out of it, that's part of parenting. Parenting is stepping up when it matters most and sharing fun memories with your kids. So that's a fun parenting memory I have. It's not my own parenthood. It's my dad's parenthood. But in many ways, it's a little microcosm of what I would hope to be as a dad, of someone who's taking his kids to do fun things, getting into some trouble, dealing with the trouble when it comes, and not complaining about it one bit. So I love that. It's a great memory of mine. When I think about my own memories, Have you ever heard of a welcome to the NFL moment? Are you a football fan at all? I'm a football fan, but I don't know if I've ever heard of that. Okay. So NFL players have their welcome to the NFL moment. And it's the moment when they realize, oh boy, I'm not in college anymore. I'm in the NFL. I'm in the national. Oh, I get what you're saying. Yeah. Okay. I like to think that there is a welcome to parenthood moment. Every parent has a welcome to parenthood moment. When you realize I'm not in college anymore, I'm I am not a newlywed anymore. I am a parent. I had my own welcome to parenthood moment. My firstborn son, Hudson, was, I think, two weeks old. And my wife got sick with mastitis. So, she was in the bed, like, just felt terrible. Had to sleep, felt terrible. Well, my two-week-old son wakes up and he is crying. He's... You know, he's losing his mind. He wants to eat. He's clearly hungry. And so I decide, you know what? I'm not going to wake up my sick wife. I know she's supposed to nurse him, but I'm not going to wake up my sick wife. She needs sleep. I'm going to take care of this problem on my own. So I rush to action and I make my son formula for the first time. We've never fed him formula before. I make him formula. And any mom out there is... pulling her hair out right now. I did not know this at the time, but this is a huge no-no. You don't just shove formula down a kid's throat when they're not used to it. So I didn't realize I was running afoul of some taboo rule, but I was. So I fixed the problem. I feed my kid a bottle of formula, and he is still chugging it down. So I make another bottle of formula. I feed him. Well, just then we get a notification. I get a notification from Walgreens saying that my wife's prescription medication for her mastitis is ready. So I think, okay, you know what? I'm not going to wake her up. I'm not going to leave her with the baby. I'm going to take the baby. And on the way to Walgreens, I get to Walgreens and I look in the rearview mirror and my son is like just throwing up all of the formula that I just fed him. I'm two weeks into parenthood. So I'm like, What in the world? I actually brought a change of clothes in the Walgreens parking lot. I'm sitting there in the car. I'm changing him. It's just disgusting. I change his clothes. I go into Walgreens. We're getting the medication. And while we're in line at the pharmacy, he just throws up more formula. So now we have run through the second pair of clothes and there's nothing to do. There's no cleaning it up. You just, there's nothing to do. So my welcome to parenthood moment was whenever I tried to fix a problem and made it a lot worse. And I realized this is parenthood. I have to change clothes. I have to go pick up medication. I have to solve problems and in so doing probably create more problems that I didn't mean to. But that's part of parenthood. And so that's my welcome parenthood moment. It's never easy. It's never clear exactly what you should do, but... you try and try your best and do what you can.
SPEAKER_01:That's awesome. When you're talking about hunting memories with your dad, I could think of a lot of times that I would hunt with my dad, you know, and we'd get up somewhere story and it would be early in the morning. Now, my dad, it was usually deer hunting or turkey hunting or squirrel hunting. So he never had a hoist a boat above his head. But I remember some of those fun times with my dad as well. Could you tell us about Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I'll say parenting is hard because anytime you're raising a child out of childishness into maturity, there's just a lot of growing pains. We all are. being raised to one degree of maturity to the next. And when you're starting with raw material of a baby and trying to raise that child into a mature adult, you're going to go through a lot of growing pains. So parenting is never easy. So don't hear what I'm about to say is, you know, we've had an easy road. We've not had an easy road. But compared to some of the parents that I do know that have had really severe situations, crisis situations, We've had it easier than others. Our kids have just been wonderful, sweet kids. They've been wonderful. So we have loved every bit of parenthood, even the hard stuff. We love it. And one of the things I always say to new dads specifically, what new dads need to hear more than anything else is that you will love it. You will love parenthood. It is worth it. Everyone always talks about the challenge of parenthood. Most people don't talk about the joy of parenthood, the happiness of parenthood, the delight that this little kid brings into your life that you've never experienced anything like it until they show up. Yeah. So I'll just say we've been through a lot of challenges, but I will say we've just had a fantastic time. experience being parents. It's brought so much delight to us. But I can say that there have been some challenges. Our firstborn Hudson, he is a ham. Like he has always been one who likes the attention. He likes being the center of attention. He has pretty drastic FOMO. He hates missing out on a party. And we've always been like hosts of small group. We've always had people to our house. So when he was little, I'm saying like a year old, 18 months old, two years old. He hated going to bed. He hated going to sleep because he knew mom and dad were out in the living room having fun or a small group was out in the living room having fun and he hated it. And so one of the hardest times of parenthood was with toddlers, just like kids. Trying to deal with toddlers who haven't developed their verbal skills, haven't developed their reasoning skills, trying to help them submit to your leadership and your authority is very hard when you have a toddler. And Hudson was pretty hard-headed. He's a sweet kid now, but he was pretty hard-headed as a toddler. He loved being where the action is, was pretty hard-headed, did not want to take no for an answer. So trying to get through toddlerhood with Hudson, that was difficult. That was very difficult. And what we learned was that patience, consistency, and sometimes tough love, they pay off. It is our job as parents to discipline those we love. Discipline is actually an avenue for love. It's not something different than love. Hebrews 12 talks about God's fatherhood to us and how discipline is an aspect of his love. If he did not love you, he would not discipline you. So, for us with toddlers, discipline was always an expression of our love. It's not an expression of hatred or neglect. Or anything less than love. It's always supposed to be done out of love and as an expression of our love.
SPEAKER_01:It's really interesting that you said that. I feel like a lot of times in our human… finite minds, we see discipline is one category, love is one category, and a lot of parents that don't have good godly biblical advice will just kind of let their kids do whatever they want because they love them, but they don't understand that discipline is part of that. I really like that you said that.
SPEAKER_00:Pete That's
SPEAKER_01:exactly
SPEAKER_00:right. That's exactly right. And the more you can see discipline not as working against your love for your children, but working for your love, for your children, the better off you'll be as a parent. And I think moms especially, you know, stay-at-home moms who have really tender hearts for their kids, they need to hear that. They need to hear that tough love for your kids and discipline is actually good for them. And one of the worst things you can do is just cave to your children over and over and over again. That's not good and that's not actually loving for them.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. If you're going to go back in time to... Right before you had a kid and you were going to give yourself parenting advice now after having a kid for some time, what would that advice be?
SPEAKER_00:We read a book called Shepherding a Child's Heart by Ted Tripp. If you've ever heard of Paul Tripp, it's his brother. It's my favorite parenting book. It's phenomenal. And I don't know if, I think he talks about this in Shepherding a Child's Heart, but I might be conflating what I'm about to say with another book. But I remember reading this at some point, and I wish I would have just had a better understanding of it, that there are different goals for parenting at different stages of a child's life. So, when a child is like zero to five, the goal of your parenthood should be submission to your authority. A two-year-old does not need to learn how to reason with you and talk with you through the decision. They don't need to be a part of the decision-making process because they can't. They don't have the rational skills. Your goal for them from ages zero to five is pure submission. They need to learn how to submit to authority. You're the authority and you have to submit to God's authority. What you're doing there is setting up you're setting up a system where they learn to trust that what mom and dad say is right. And it's yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, ma'am. No, ma'am. That's the goal. And of course, It's a process. They are not going to come out of the womb ready to submit. They're going to come out of the womb ready to defy. That's in our sinful hearts. That's what little kids do. But they need to learn to submit at an early age. And then later on, ages 5 to 10, they need to start to learn how to develop some of those skills of wisdom, of making good decisions on their own. And then ages 10 to 18... That's really a flowering out of the things that they're learning from 5 to 10 years old. So, it's just a progression of wisdom. And what a lot of parents do is they kind of reverse that process. They will say, hey, I'm going to try and teach my kids a lot of wisdom early on in their lives. And then whenever they get rebellious at age 13, then I'm going to lay down the hammer of authority and submission. And that's exactly backwards. They need to learn authority and submission first, and then later on have the element of wisdom brought in where they're learning decision-making skills later on. They don't need the decision-making skills early. They need them later. They need the authority and submission early and the decision skills later. So I would just anchor that into my mind as a young parent, like, Know the goal for ages 0 to 5 and know the goal for ages 5 to 10, 10 to 18. There are different goals at different stages. And just being able to be okay that, hey, my kid doesn't really have decision-making skills yet because that's not what we're asking them to do. I'm making the decisions they're learning to submit right now. I think that's helpful for them.
SPEAKER_01:That's awesome. My dad was telling me about that book, Shepherding a Child's Heart, as well. Yeah. And he said that he really benefited from that process as well as he was trying to be a parent. So that's really neat that you mentioned that. To end, as we kind of draw this to a close, do you have one or a couple funny parenting stories, maybe your favorites? Because I hear that there's a lot of funny parenting stories every time I ask that question. Oh, we've got way more funny parenting stories than we could share here. But do you have one or a couple of your favorite? Yeah,
SPEAKER_00:I remember when my oldest son, I don't know why, it just all seems to gravitate around Hudson's funny moments. He's just a lightning rod for funny moments. I truly do love all my kids the same, but he's a lightning rod for funny things, funny moments. Yeah. He gets talked about a little bit more than the others because he just has a couple of these one-liners that are pretty funny. But I remember when he was probably five years old, I was tucking him into bed one night and I said, I said, Hudson, I'm just so proud of the young man you're becoming. I see you growing. I'm just so proud of the young man you're becoming. And he said, thanks dad. I'm so proud of the old man you're becoming. Uh, that, that will always stick with me. He's so proud of the old man that I've been, I'm becoming, uh, and he meant it so sincerely. He was not trying to be funny at all. He was just trying to reciprocate a compliment and, uh, he did it. He did it spot on. So
SPEAKER_01:that's funny. I, uh, That's right. Yep.
SPEAKER_00:We have all kinds of funny videos. Most of our funny moments from our kids are caught on video. That's one of the great things about being a parent during the technology age is we can capture so many of these moments on camera. So we have a lot of those funny videos.
SPEAKER_01:That's awesome. I always like watching AFV for those funny videos. And sometimes you get like the kid that says, you know, something ridiculous and it just makes me laugh. That's right. Well, on behalf of all the listeners and myself, I want to thank you for being able to be on the show today.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you so much. It's an honor, and I'm so grateful for what you're doing and for what FBC Kearney is doing. It's a great church.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you for joining me. I hope this was an encouragement to you. Please follow the show, leave a review, and share it with the people around you.