Son

Buying gifts for your son should feel straightforward. It's never straightforward. When they’re younger it’s simple. Once they hit teens, doubt creeps in. As adults, with distinct tastes and lives of their own, you find yourself staring blankly and contemplating if gift cards even constitute a gift. For the record, they do. We built this guide because the gap between wanting to buy the perfect gift and knowing what that perfect gift is can feel wider than it should. The reason you can’t find it? Translation. You know your son better than most. But understanding your son and understanding what he wants for his birthday/Christmas/etc are two very different things. And Shops don’t make it easy. So we picked everything in this guide with your relationship in mind. The ages, yes. The budget, definitely. But also the way he’d react when he opens it. The sixteen year old son who thinks he wants nothing at all and will light up when you surprise him. The newly independent son who has nowhere to hang his coat or a decent knife for dinner. The adult son who you don’t quite get like you used to but is still, at heart, your boy. This isn’t a shopping list we’ve just thrown together. If something seemed like it’d be great on paper but wouldn’t work in real life, it didn’t make the cut. We want the things he’ll use. Keep. Recommend to his friends. The gifts that stick, not the ones that sit idle in a drawer until you buy them new homes. Some of our picks are practical. Some are things he’d never buy himself but won’t stop smiling about after you mention you picked up. Everything here has been personally vetted by us. And we asked ourselves would I give this as a gift? If the answer was no or even paused, it was cut. Your son is worth taking the time for. We’ve done the hard work for you.