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Hello! We are Richard and Linda Eyre. For more than 30 years we have been writing books for parents on families, life-balance, and parenting.

We have published with Random House, Simon and Schuster, St. Martin’s Press, Deseret Book, McGraw Hill, and Penguin, but we have found a publisher that we like better than any of them. It is us. It is ourselves. It is avoiding all the middlemen and getting books to those who want them for free. And it is getting them to people quicker, with more interaction and more feedback for us.

We hope you will like this approach as much as we do! Here is our new philosophy of what books should be in today’s world and our new mission statement about how we hope to make it happen:

The Goal:

Make all of our books available online for free. How is it possible? It’s possible because these are our books, we own the copyrights, and we are more interested in getting them to the maximum number of people than in making them generate the maximum amount of money.

Why are you doing it?

Parenting is difficult today—harder and fraught with more challenges than at any time in history. Kids don’t come with owner’s manuals or assembly instructions, and most parents and grandparents don’t have time to analytically and deliberately calculate a family and parenting strategy to match the needs of their kids and the trauma of our times. We have been able to do exactly that kind of analysis and strategizing because of the freedom and access that some of our bestselling books have given us.

Because books have been good to us, we are now at a point where we want to give back, and to give their content to the growing number of parents who need help. We think families are the basic unit of our society and of our economy and we believe that the most important work anyone does is within the walls of his or her home and that no other success can compensate for failure in the family. Thus if anything we have learned, or done, or written can be of help to parents trying to do their best by their children…we are happy to give it.

How does it work?

We already have nearly half of our books available for free. They may be the only copies you will ever need. To access the free books below, you need the Eyres’ Free Books membership, which you can register for or add to your existing ValuesParenting account that you are logged in to. (If all you have done is registered for an account with the “Register for Forums” link at the top of the page, you won’t be able to access the books until you add this free membership to your account).

In addition to the free books offered here, you can now order each of the Eyres’ 9 newest books for 40% off with free shipping by using the access code EYREFRIEND at our publisher’s website.

The growing list of free books is below. Click on book titles to read descriptions. View a list of all of the books we have written on the Books Page.

Register for free in the “How does it work” paragraph above to access any of the free books below.

I Challenge You…I Promise You
by Richard M. Eyre and Paul H. Dunn
(1972)
Category: Perspective
Free eBook
Relationships: Self, Family, God
by Richard M. Eyre and Paul H. Dunn
(1974)
Category: Relationships
Free eBook
The Discovery of Joy
by Richard Eyre
(1975)
Category: Perspective
Free eBook
The Birth That We Call Death
by Richard M. Eyre and Paul H. Dunn
(1976)
Category: Comfort
Free eBook
What Manner of Man
by Richard M. Eyre
(1979)
Category: Spiritual
Free Online
Teaching Children Joy
by Linda and Richard Eyre
(1980)
Category: Parenting
Free eBook
Simplified Husbandship, Simplified Fathership
by Richard M. Eyre
(1980)
Category: Fatherhood
Free eBook
The Awakening
by Richard M. Eyre
(1980)
Category: Novel
Free eBook
Teaching Children Responsibility
by Linda and Richard Eyre
(1982)
Category: Parenting
Free eBook
The Secret of the Sabbath
by Richard M. Eyre
(1982)
Category: Spiritual
Free eBook
A Joyful Mother of Children
by Linda J. Eyre
(1983)
Category: Parenting
Free eBook
The Change That We Call Birth
by Linda and Richard Eyre
(1984)
Category: Parenting
Free eBook
Mother, Father and the Family That Worked
by Linda and Richard Eyre
(1984)
Category: Parenting
Free eBook
LifeBalance
by Linda and Richard Eyre
(1987)
Category: Balance
Free eBook
I Didn’t Plan to be a Witch
by Linda Eyre
(1988)
Category: Motherhood
Free eBook
Stewardship of the Heart
by Richard M. Eyre
(1990)
Category: Spiritual
Free eBook
Three Steps to a Strong Family
by Linda and Richard Eyre
(1994)
Category: Parenting
Free eBook
Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There
by Richard Eyre
(1995)
Category: Perspective
Free eBook
The Wrappings and the Gifts
by Richard Eyre
(1996)
Category: Religion
Free eBook
Spiritual Serendipity
by Richard Eyre
(1997)
Category: Perspective
Free eBook
Spiritual Stewardship
by Richard M. Eyre
(1997)
Category: Perspective
Free eBook
How to Talk to your Child About Sex
by Linda and Richard Eyre
(1998)
Category: Parenting
Phase 1 and 2 Free Online
Life Before Life
by Richard Eyre
(2000)
Category: Spiritual
Free eBook
The Happy Family
by Linda and Richard Eyre
(2001)
Category: Parenting
Free eBook
Empty Nest Parenting
by Richard and Linda Eyre, with Saren Eyre Loosli
(2002)
Category: Parenting
Free eBook

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I Challenge You/I Promise You

Richard’s first book, written just out of Harvard Business School and co-authored with Paul H. Dunn. 35 live-challenges, each answered by turning book over to read the corresponding promise. Or, you can read the promises first and turn the book upside down to read the challenge that leads to each promise. One of the 10 best-selling LDS books of all time.

Relationships/Self, God, Family

As Richard overworked himself, co-founding a Washington DC political consulting firm, he began to understand that Relationships are always more important than Achievements, and that in fact, everything we do in life should be a means, leading to the end of a better relationship with someone that matters.

The Discovery of Joy

More than mere happiness, JOY, to the Eyres is the very purpose of life and encompasses the heavy, hard times as well as the light and lifting ones. In fact, Joy comes in four levels, and each one can be cultivated to lead to the next.

The Birth That We Call Death

Great minds throughout history have viewed death as a beginning and as a birth into the eternity that is our natural home. A staple gift for funerals and the grief-stricken for decades, this book is a collection and a communication of the most comforting and insightful statements ever made about death and about what happens next.

What Manner of Man

While serving three years in London as a voluntary "Mission President" for his Church, Richard developed a personal objective of helping the 600 missionaries who served under his direction to develop deeper and more personal relationships with Christ. He wrote 48 short vignettes, each about one facet of Jesus’s character or personality and challenged his missionaries to ponder a separate aspect each Sunday of the year.

Teaching Children Joy

The book that launched the Eyres into their career as full time writers and speakers, "TCJ" is a brilliant challenge to the idea of pushy, early academic education and makes the case that while children are at their most impressionable age they should be taught life’s most important subject which is JOY on all its most basic levels. The book became the basis for JOY SCHOOLS, a social and emotional skills building curriculum that has been taught to hundreds of thousands of preschoolers around the globe.

Simplified Husbandship & Fathership

In his management consulting practice, Richard would often ask his clients what their goals were for their businesses or their professions and he found that most had clear and ready answers. When asked what their goals and plans were for their families, however, most men could come up only with very vague answers. To fill the void, this book lays out the basic steps of succeeding inside the home as well as outside it.

The Awakening

Richard’s one and only novel is the story of an amnesiac who, in search who he is, finds his spiritual identity before he discovers his name and develops his future priorities before he relocates his past history.

Teaching Children Responsibility

As the elementary age sequel to the preschool oriented Teaching Children Joy, this book is an innovative collection of methods for helping children to become accountable and to accept the consequences of their actions. From being responsible for their things and their behavior to being accountable for their choices and their relationships, this book has become a worldwide classic on helping kids to transition into responsible adults.

The Secret of the Sabbath

Richard believes that dedicated, devoted, disciplined observance of the Sabbath Day brings remarkable physical, mental, and spiritual blessings. But real Sabbath observance is much more than a list of things "not to do." It involves a weekly spiritual "re-creation" of worship and planning that serves as an invitation to inspiration and a regular course correction of one’s life. In stunning, clear language, he lays out a set of challenges for how to make Sundays the most important (and the most joyful) day of the week.

A Joyful Mother of Children

A veritable treasure trove of great advice for moms! Linda’s intimate and personal insights into the roller coaster adventure of motherhood will tickle your funny bone even as it opens and explains ideas that you will want to try as soon as you have read them. The phrase "Joyful Mother of Children," taken from the Psalms, is a good description of the perspective of seeing our kids as our treasures, and this is both the attitude and the goal of all of Linda’s writing.

The Change That We Call Birth

The Change That We Call Birth. Having written the best seller The Birth that we Call Death, Richard had begun to think in great depth about the major transitions of the eternities, and it seemed compelling to write another volume about the other great transition, the one that takes us from the premortal world into this life. And, as it turns out, The Change that we Call Birth is also a parenting book of sorts because it reminds us beautifully and powerfully that these children that we call "ours" actually belong to God and are co-eternal and equal in spiritual age to ourselves. This perspective may impact our parenting more than anything else in life.

Mother, Father and the Family That Worked

The Eyres have always liked fables, allegories, and metaphors, and this little volume is all three. In fable-like language, it tells the story of a family fraught with problems until they hit on some parenting and home-organizing ideas that changed everything and made their parenting and their family begin to really "work."

LifeBalance

Perhaps one of Richard’s true classics, this book tackles the society-wide problem of work/family balance. But rather than rehashing all the old time-management ideas, it takes the perspective that balance is really a mental and spiritual challenge and one of establishing and living by true priorities which put family and relationships above everything else. The book also introduces the concept that "inner balance" is possible only when a person’s structure and spontaneity coexist and feed each other. The solution of "spiritual serendipity" is introduced here and then runs through many of Richard’s subsequent books.

I Didn't Plan to be a Witch

One of the best known and best loved "motherhood" books in the world, this captivating volume is short on parenting advice but long on parenting experience. Praised by mothers everywhere as the book that "really gets it" and that tells "every mother’s" story and predicament with candor and honesty as well as humor, this may be Linda’s most popular and perennial book. Read it and laugh, read it and weep, and read it to realize that you are not the first mom to feel the panic and frustration as well as the joy.

Stewardship of the Heart

Both Richard and Linda Eyre have embraced two favorite "word concepts" that have guided and influenced how they have lived their lives. Interestingly, both words have eleven letters and start with "S". The first word is "Serendipity" which inspired Serendipity of the Spirit (see above) and the second is "Stewardship" which is the subject matter for Stewardship of the Heart. Stewardship, Richard believes, is the humble and out-turning alternative to the proud and inward attitude of Ownership. Stewardship, in the spiritual sense, is the belief that God owns all and that each of us is given charge of many unique blessings which we are to care for and magnify. Whereas the perception of Ownership breeds envy, jealousy, condescension and enmity, a paradigm of Stewardship generates gratitude, empathy, and teamwork. More than just describing an attitude or a belief, this book tells us how to reorient our lives based on a mega-principle.

Three Steps to a Strong Family

What makes families strong and lasting and cohesive and loving? The Eyres believe that there are three primary things that all successful families share-well established family traditions or rituals, clear family laws or rules, and some kind of a family economy that shares responsibilities and rewards their accomplishments. These become the three sections of this volume which suggests literally hundreds of ideas to help parents take the "three steps to a strong family."

Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There

Are we sure we want to accept all of the old clichés that our mothers taught us...like "If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well." Or, "Don’t just sit there, do something." Maybe there are replacement maxims that actually are better fitted to today’s world, like "If a thing is just barely worth doing, just barely do it." Or, "Don’t just do something, sit there"-sit there and think about it and decide what you really want and find the best way to get it. This delightful little volume calls into question dozens of old clichés that may not work too well anymore and replaces them with "today’s maxims." Guaranteed to make you think, the book draws heavily from Richard’s rich experience and draws readers into "a whole set of new paradigms."

The Wrappings and The Gifts

During their Mission Presidency in London, and throughout another year spent in England ten years later, Richard and Linda became close friends with a Member of the British Parliament who asked a highly thoughtful and interesting question: "I know about Joseph Smith and the Gold Plates and the Book of Mormon and the fact that you believe your Church was restored by God" he said, "but what I want to know is exactly what it was that was restored. What doctrines or teachings of Christ do you claim were lost and had to be replaced or put back on earth." Then to make his question more graphic, he added "To me all the visions and gold plates are just the wrappings. I want to know what gifts are inside-what actual doctrines are in the package." Richard wrote an 84-page letter to answer the man’s question, and later put it into this book.

Spiritual Serendipity

The earlier book Serendipity of the Spirit (see no. 27 above) was written primarily for LDS readers, but by word of mouth and book-sharing, its concepts spread far beyond Church members and there began to be a demand for a "less religious but not less spiritual" edition. Spiritual Serendipity was Richard’s response.

Spiritual Stewardship

How to Talk to your Child about Sex

Over the years, the Eyres have come to feel that earlier and earlier recreational and experimental sex is the biggest emotional, physical and spiritual danger that kids face today. Many parents do a pretty good job of discussing the dangers of drugs and violence and bullying to their children, yet often do not even dare to attempt the "big talk" with their kids about sex. Yet study after study shows that the earlier and more thorough this big talk from parents is, the later their kids will experiment or become sexually active. Richard and Linda decided to tackle the problem (and the discomfort and embarrassment parents feel in addressing it) head on in this candid and straight forward book. At its core is a big talk dialogue that reads like a play...You say this...child will say this...you say this...child will say this, or this...in each of the cases, you will say this or this. Parents throughout the world have depended on this book not only for the big talk (which the Eyres say should come around age 8) but for the follow-up family discussions covering everything from pornography to homosexuality and from modesty to how to say "no."

Life Before Life

Always troubled by theology that contemplates a "one-way eternity" with beliefs in a forever forward but no forever backward, Richard has written this defense of the premise that we did not flare into existence at birth but rather came to earth as individual spirits and spirit children of God who were sent here as another chapter in our eternal growth and perfection. Having this perspective, Richard believes, gives whole new meaning to things that we call coincidences and allows us to see the bigger picture about where we came from, why we are here, and where we are going.

The Happy Family

Tolstoy begins his book Anna Karenna with an intriguing statement, "All happy families are the same; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own unique way." During their extensive and worldwide travel and speaking to parents and families, the Eyres have observed certain "best practices" that seem to always be used in some form by relatively happy and successful families. They have collected and editorialized about these in this book which will stimulate you to include or adapt things into your family that really "work."

Empty Nest Parenting

The first time one of the Eyres’ children turned 18 and left for college, Richard and Linda began realizing that "you are never done with parenting, you just shift into a new phase of it, and parenting problems do not go away, they just get bigger and more expensive." Responding to their own situation, and interviewing and holding discussions with groups of other "emptying nesters" they began to see certain patterns that worked and others that definitely did not. They concluded that while there was no single "right way" to do things like financial help or regular communication or ongoing advice, parents who had a plan and had thought these issues through were doing much better than parents who were just letting things happen and responding to one need or problem at a time without any thought-out strategy or set of policies to guide them. With the subtitle "adjusting your stewardship as your kids leave home" this book will help you get through the difficult emotions of having kids leave and will give you methods and techniques to continue to be in close touch even as you respect the emerging independence.