16th Birthday
Gifts for sixteen year olds aren’t easy. They’re too old for anything remotely childish, but too young for lots of stuff that’s marketed at adults. Most gifts for sixteen fall into that middle zone. Too far either way and you risk getting it wrong. Too young and they’ll shame you by hiding it. Too old and they’ll accept it gratefully, before it gathers dust. We’ve been thinking a lot about sixteen year olds recently. The 16th birthday is special. To them. It feels special even if the rest of society isn’t quite ready to celebrate that yet but your gift should be.←Break age related barriers, we thought.
The stuff we wanted had to respect that they’re old enough to have their own identity. Your sixteen year old isn’t your baby. But they’re not an adult either. They are a sixteen year old. Period. The right gift acknowledges that they have their own taste; their own views on what they like and don’t like. And that they care about these things. When picking gifts for your teen ignore anything you know they’ll never care about.
What do they care about? We went down a lot of route but ultimately a sixteen year old spends their time thinking about who they are. Sure. But for our purposes that translated into – they care about how they look, music, what their friends think, their room and who they’re going to become. Speak to any of those without being too heavy handed and you’ll score major points. Gifts that are carefully selected rather than picking the first thing you see.
Speaking of milestones. 16 year olds care about those too. A birthday is a big deal. Their birthday. And don’t 16th birthdays just stand out above all the rest? You don’t want to get something they’ll forget about straight away but spending hundreds on the first piece of jewellery you see is maybe overdoing it. You want something as special as they are. Gift giving should be simple but we weren’t going to stop asking questions until we found gifts that we felt were special enough.←Put thought into.
As you can probably guess picking things to include was actually really easy. Ask ourselves if we’d give it to the sixteen year old we know. Would they treasure it? If we weren’t sure we crossed it off the list. It doesn’t need to be as big as the birthday section in John Lewis but it should be much more thoughtful.