How I Finally Cracked the Teenager

Shopping for a teenager when you are not their parent is one of the harder gifting challenges. They are too old for the things you remember them liking and too young for the things adults want. They have strong opinions they mostly will not tell you. And they are allergic to anything that reads as try-hard.

My nephew Eli is sixteen. He has been sixteen, in terms of difficulty to shop for, since about age twelve. Every year I either got it wrong or I gave up and handed him cash, which he appreciated and which felt like defeat.

I decided to actually pay attention for a few months before his birthday.

Not in a weird way. Just noticing. What was he talking about when he did talk. What did he do with his actual free time. What came up when he was not being polite or performing normal for the adults in the room.

He made music. Not casually. Seriously. He had been messing around with production software for two years and he never talked about it because he was not ready to talk about it, but he was making things and he cared about it a lot.

His headphones were bad. The kind you use for watching videos, not for listening critically when you are trying to mix something. He was doing real work on cheap gear.

I got him studio monitor headphones. The real kind. Not the flashy ones, the flat-response ones that producers actually use. I included a note that said: for the music. I know about the music.

He looked at the note for a second and then looked at me and said you know about the music?

I said I know about the music.

He hugged me, which is not something he does.

The gift was not about the headphones. It was about telling him that I had been paying attention to who he actually is, the real version, not the version he puts out for family dinners. That is the thing teenagers rarely get from adults. Someone noticing the real thing.