Buying for a child when you are not the parent
Most people in this section are not parents. Godparents, aunts and uncles, family friends, colleagues who have just had a baby. The difference matters: you are choosing for someone whose daily life you only partly know.
That produces a different logic. A parent buys what is missing. A guest buys what will not create a problem, and those are two separate lists.
What is safe from the outside
A good gift from a guest has three properties. It does not make noise, it does not demand floor space, and it does not duplicate something already in the house.
- Books matched to the age. Almost never surplus to requirements.
- Craft and science kits, consumable by nature.
- Board games, if the family actually plays them.
- Clothing and textiles bought a size ahead.
- An experience: a ticket, an outing, a workshop attended with the child.
The awkward end covers large toys, musical instruments, kits with hundreds of small parts and anything requiring an adult to assemble it before the child can use it.
Handing it over in front of other children
This gets remembered rarely and shapes the reaction more than the contents do.
At a birthday party the gift is opened in front of other children, and they compare. An unusually large present shifts attention away from the child whose day it is, and the difference between gifts becomes the topic of the afternoon.
Where several guests are bringing something, a quick word with the parents about the scale everyone is buying at prevents that entirely.
In a family with several children, spare a thought for the siblings. One child receiving something while the others receive nothing usually ends in tears before the cake.
A guest's gift succeeds when the parents are not afterwards wondering where to put it.
Flowers and balloons for children
Children receive flowers less often than adults, and usually for specific occasions: the first day of school, the end of the year, a performance, a teenage birthday.
Keep a child's bouquet small and light. A large armful is awkward in small hands and impossible to hold for a photograph.
Balloons work nearly always and create the sense of an occasion without adding to what the household has to store. Helium latex lasts the evening, foil shapes outlive the party.
If the gift is going to a children's party in Lima, agree the hour in advance. Before the programme starts works considerably better than the middle of it.
JFLOO keeps the children's selection alongside the other recipients. Ask the parents one thing: what the child already has, and what should definitely not arrive in the house.