Richard Eyre > Quotes

“Resolution, like responsibility, is a product of ownership, and kids can't resolve a conflict until they figure out how they contributed to it.”
― Richard Eyre, The Entitlement Trap: How to Rescue Your Child with a New Family System of Choosing, Earning, and Ownership

“This sense of entitlement contributes mightily to sloppiness, to low incentive, to boredom, to bad choices, to instant gratification, to constant demands for more, and to all kinds of addictions (including the addiction to technology).”
― Richard Eyre, The Entitlement Trap: How to Rescue Your Child with a New Family System of Choosing, Earning, and Ownership

“Entitlement is a double- edged sword (or a double-jawed trap) for kids. On one edge it gives kids all that they don’t need—indulgence, dullness, conceit, and laziness; and on the backswing, it takes from them everything they do need—motivation, inde- pendence, inventiveness, pride, responsibility, and a chance to really work for things and to build their own sense of fulfill- ment and self-esteem.”
― Richard Eyre, The Entitlement Trap: How to Rescue Your Child with a New Family System of Choosing, Earning, and Ownership

“we parents give our kids things instead of time, spoiling them as we add fuel to the entitlement flame.”
― Richard Eyre, The Entitlement Trap: How to Rescue Your Child with a New Family System of Choosing, Earning, and Ownership

“In the name of love, we give our kids ✽ indulgence rather than consequences; ✽ instant rather than delayed gratification; ✽ laxness rather than discipline; ✽ dependence rather than independence; ✽ and entitlement rather than responsibility.”
― Richard Eyre, The Entitlement Trap: How to Rescue Your Child with a New Family System of Choosing, Earning, and Ownership

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

William Wordsworth - Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
― Richard Eyre, Life Before Life: Origins of the Soul

“Within you is a spirit that lived before your physical birth and that will continue to live after your physical death. Eternity goes both ways. You lived--not as another person but as yourself--in a spiritual pre-life.

God had clear and beautiful purpose in providing you with this mortal phase of eternity. Part of that purpose has to do with the struggle of being on your own here, without memory of there.

But you do have some sliver of memory--just enough to feel i t is true when you hear it--just enough to believe in the earlier life of your own soul.”
― Richard Eyre, Life Before Life: Origins of the Soul

“Of course, ownership of education is about much more than grades. Helping children to love learning itself, and to see education as a process of self-discovery and of recognizing their aptitudes and gifts so they can build on them for their college major and their career—these are the real measurements of educational success and the real areas where we want our children to feel equity. So our task is helping kids to feel ownership”
― Richard Eyre, The Entitlement Trap: How to Rescue Your Child with a New Family System of Choosing, Earning, and Ownership

“Give your family greater depth, greater permanence, greater individuality, and give your kids a bigger identity and a bigger sense of inclusion and belonging. This is how you give them real ownership and equity in their own family!”
― Richard Eyre, The Entitlement Trap: How to Rescue Your Child with a New Family System of Choosing, Earning, and Ownership

“All macro entities and institutions in the private, public, and voluntary sectors ultimately depend on the basic unit of families and thus should strongly support, financially and otherwise, well-conceived efforts to preserve and strengthen families and micro solutions.”
― Richard Eyre, The Turning: Why the State of the Family Matters, and What the World Can Do about It