The question everybody can answer
How old is Dad?
You may not know what he was into at seventeen, but you always know roughly how old he is. The useful thing is that a ten-year bracket does not sit inside one decade: a dad in his fifties was a teenager across the eighties and the nineties, so each list below is drawn from both.
Pick the bracket
The birth years are worked out from this year’s calendar, not typed in, so they stay right.
30sDads in their thirtiesAt this age a gift has to earn its footprint before it earns anything else: young children, a small house and no spare surface.6 gifts · born 1987 to 199640sDads in their fortiesPeak obligation. Dad is not short of money so much as short of an hour, and his teenage years straddle the Nintendo 64 and the first Xbox.14 gifts · born 1977 to 198650sDads in their fiftiesDad has had thirty years to buy his own drill, his own barbecue and his own whisky glasses, and his teenage years straddle the arcade and the CD.14 gifts · born 1967 to 197660sDads in their sixtiesVinyl at one end of his teens and a boom box at the other, and a house he has started to think about downsizing.13 gifts · born 1957 to 196670sDads in their seventiesThe house is getting smaller on purpose. Anything that needs a shelf is starting from behind.13 gifts · born 1947 to 195680sDads in their eightiesElvis at one end of his teens and the moon landing at the other, and a present that is usually from three generations at once.15 gifts · born 1937 to 1946
If you can answer the decade question, answer that one instead
Age tells you how old he is. The decade he was a teenager in tells you what he actually likes, which is the thing a gift has to hit. These pages exist because the age question is the one people can always answer about someone else, and every one of them points at the decade pages underneath it.