Eyre, Richard M(elvin) 1944-

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EYRE, Richard M(elvin) 1944-

PERSONAL: Born October 28, 1944, in Baltimore, MD; son of H. Dean (a businessman) and Ruth (Swenson) Eyre; married Linda Jacobson, July 30, 1969; children: nine. Education: Utah State University, B.S., 1968; Brigham Young University, M.A., 1969; Harvard University, M.B.A., 1971. Religion: Mormon.

ADDRESSES: Office—c/o Publishing Department, Deseret Book Company, P.O. Box 30178, Salt Lake City, Utah 84130.

CAREER: Bailey, Deardourff and Eyre, Washington, D.C., executive vice-president, 1971-74; R. M. Eyre and Associates, Management Consultants, Salt Lake City, Utah, president, beginning 1975. International public speaker and workshop leader. Has appeared on network television programs, including Oprah, CBS Early Show, Prime Time Live, Today, and Good Morning America. Former cohost, with wife, Linda, of national weekly cable television show "Families Are Forever."

WRITINGS:

I Challenge You, Bookcraft (Salt Lake City, UT), 1972.

(With Paul H. Dunn) Relationships: Self, Family, God, Bookcraft (Salt Lake City, UT), 1974.

The Discovery of Joy, Bookcraft (Salt Lake City, UT), 1974, revised edition, 2000.

(With Paul H. Dunn) The Birth That We Call Death, Bookcraft (Salt Lake City, UT), 1976.

(With wife, Linda Eyre) Teaching Children Joy, Bookcraft (Salt Lake City, UT), 1976, reprinted as Teaching Your Children Joy, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1994.

(With Paul H. Dunn) Goals, Bookcraft (Salt Lake City, UT), 1976.

What Manner of Man, Bookcraft (Salt Lake City, UT), 1979.

(With Paul H. Dunn) Life Planning, Bookcraft (Salt Lake City, UT), 1979.

Simplified Husbandship, Simplified Fathership, Bookcraft (Salt Lake City, UT), 1980.

The Awakening, Bookcraft (Salt Lake City, UT), 1981.

(With wife, Linda Eyre) Teaching Children Responsibility, Deseret Book Company (Salt Lake City, UT), 1982, reprinted as Teaching Your Children Responsibility, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1994.

Free to Be Free, Bookcraft (Salt Lake City, UT), 1983.

(Coauthor) The Change That We Call Birth, Bookcraft (Salt Lake City, UT), 1984.

(Coauthor) Teaching Children Charity: A Program to Help Teens and Preteens Forget Themselves, Deseret Book Company (Salt Lake City, UT), 1986.

Lifebalance: Priority Balance, Attitude Balance, Goal Balance in All Areas of Your Life, Ballantine Books (New York, NY), 1988.

(Coauthor) Teaching Children Sensitivity, Random House (New York, NY), 1988, reprinted as Teaching Your Children Sensitivity, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1995.

(Coauthor) Teaching Your Children Values, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1993.

(Coauthor) Three Steps to a Strong Family, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1994.

Don't Just Do Something, Sit There: New Maxims to Refresh and Enrich Your Life, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1995.

Spiritual Serendipity: Cultivating and Celebrating the Art of the Unexpected, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1997.

(Coauthor) How to Talk to Your Child about Sex: It's Best to Start Early, but It's Never Too Late: A Step-by-Step Guide for Every Age, Golden Books (New York, NY), 1998.

Life before Life: How Knowing Where You Came from Can Change Who You are and Where You Are Going, Shadow Mountain (Salt Lake City, UT), 2000.

(With wife, Linda Eyre) The Happy Family: Restoring the 11 Essential Elements That Make Families Work, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2001.

(With wife, Linda Eyre) Empty-Nest Parenting: Adjusting Your Stewardship as Your Children Leave Home, Deseret Book Company (Salt Lake City, UT), 2002.

(With wife, Linda Eyre) The Book of Nurturing: Nine Natural Laws for Enriching Your Family Life, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 2003.

Also coauthor of titles in the "Value of the Month" series, including Honesty, Courage, Fidelity, Loyalty, Love, Unselfishness, Kindness, Justice, Peaceability, Respect, Self-Discipline, and Self Reliance. Coauthor of The Happy Family (e-book). Contributor to periodicals, including Meridian. Eyre's work has been translated into German, Spanish, and Turkish.

ADAPTATIONS: Three Steps to a Strong Family has been adapted for audio cassette by Time Warner Audiobooks; Teaching Your Children Values has been adapted for audio cassette by Simon & Schuster, 1994.

SIDELIGHTS: Richard M. Eyre is a prolific author of spiritual and parenting books, many of them coauthored with his wife, Linda Eyre. In his writings, the author seeks both to inspire and to give advice of a practical nature. A Mormon and a father of nine children, he has written several books on child-rearing, and his children have even helped him with some of his books.

In many of his books, Eyre has focused on the stressful aspects of raising children without extended families and the difficulties of countering media and institutional demands that frequently go against parental values. Teaching Your Children Values was the first parenting book in fifty years to reach the number-one spot on the New York Times bestseller list. He produced several other books with similar themes, including Teaching Children Sensitivity, Teaching Children Responsibility, and Three Steps to a Strong Family. In Empty-Nest Parenting: Adjusting Your Stewardship as Your Children Leave Home, the Eyres drew on "all the mistakes" they made in raising their own children to give advice to others, as the author told Doug Wright in a Deseret Books interview. Although the title seems like an oxymoron, Eyre commented to Wright that the idea behind the book was to show the ways in which parenting continues even after children have left the home.

Reviewing Three Steps to a Strong Family, a Publishers Weekly writer found the Eyres "supremely qualified" to create such a book and approved of the way the authors encourage parents "to respect children without coddling them." Practical, "systematic and fun," methods for improving family quality are clearly outlined as well, according to the reviewer. The "fresh techniques" offered by the authors were also praised by Kathryn Carpenter in a Booklist review of Teaching Your Children Sensitivity.

How to Talk to Your Child about Sex: It's Best to Start Early, but It's Never Too Late: A Step-by-Step Guide for Every Age summarizes Eyres' beliefs about the best way parents can communicate with their children about the important and sometimes embarrassing subject of intimacy and reproduction. In the Eyres's view, it is vitally important for parents to give their children this information rather than letting them absorb it from their peers. While they feel that eight is the ideal age for this important talk, they emphasize that it is never "too late" to discuss sex and morality with one's offspring. Booklist reviewer Stephanie Zvirin commented that the Eyres's book is "practical and eas[y] to use, loaded with parent-child dialogues and readings that can be easily adapted to fit individual circumstances."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Eyre, Richard M., and Linda Eyre, How to Talk to Your Child about Sex: It's Best to Start Early, but It's Never Too Late: A Step-by-Step Guide for Every Age, Golden Books (New York, NY), 1998.

periodicals

Booklist, March 15, 1993, Denise Perry Donavin, review of Teaching Your Children Values, p. 1285; March 1, 1995, Kathryn Carpenter, review of Teaching Your Children Sensitivity, p. 1167; October 15, 1998, Stephanie Zvirin, review of How to Talk to Your Child about Sex: It's Best to Start Early, but It's Never Too Late: A Step-by-Step Guide for Every Age, p. 383.

Library Journal, January, 1988, Mary Kirk, review of Lifebalance: Priority Balance, Attitude Balance, Goal Balance in All Areas of Your Life, p. 90; March 15, 1993, Jennifer Langlois, review of Teaching Your Children Values, p. 95; March 15, 1994, Linda Bredengard, review of Teaching Your Children Values (sound recording), p. 118; July, 1994, Nancy Ives, review of Three Steps to a Strong Family, p. 149; October 1, 1998, Martha Cornog, review of How to Talk to Your Child about Sex, p. 118; June 1, 2003, Charity Peake, review of The Book of Nurturing: Nine Natural Laws for Enriching Your Family Life, p. 156.

Publishers Weekly, April 11, 1994, review of Three Steps to a Strong Family, p. 49; March 31, 1997, review of Spiritual Serendipity: Cultivating and Celebrating the Art of the Unexpected, p. 57; August 28, 2000, review of Life before Life: How Knowing Where You Came from Can Change Who You are and Where You Are Going, p. 77.

Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO), November 1, 1998, Janet Simons, "Talk the Talk Timing, Honesty Helps Parents Teach Kids about the Birds and the Bees," p. 10F.