Retirement gift ideas for mum or dad

A parent's retirement usually gets two presents. One comes from work — a collection, a card everyone signed, sometimes a watch or a bottle. The other comes from the family, and it's the harder one, because the family isn't marking the end of a job. It's marking the end of the part of their life you mostly saw from the outside.

So don't compete with the leaving-do present. The gifts that land from a son or daughter are the ones about the person who's retiring, not the job they're leaving: what those working years were actually like, and what the week looks like now that it's their own.

First, work out which retirement it is

• A clean stop. The last day is a real last day. A gift for the first free weeks — a trip booked for a Tuesday in term time, when everyone else is at work — lands well.
• Winding down. Three days a week, then two. The "now you've got all this time" present lands badly on someone who hasn't got it yet.
• Stopping without choosing to. Redundancy, ill health, or caring for a partner. Treat it gently. Nothing that jokes about pipe and slippers, and nothing that assumes they're celebrating.

What tends to land

1. 1

   A first-week plan that isn't yours

   Ask what they've been putting off until they had the time, then pay for the first step of it. The course, the tools, the membership, the train tickets. Theirs to choose. The gift is that it's started.

2. 2

   Kit for the thing they already do

   Most people retire into something they've been doing at weekends for years: an allotment, a choir, golf, the walking group. Better kit for that beats anything bought for "retirement" in general.

3. 3

   Time with you, on a weekday

   A weekday lunch, once a month, that you've put in both diaries. It costs little and answers the thing a lot of new retirees don't say out loud, which is that the days got quieter.

4. 4

   The working life, written down

   Their children usually know the job title and not much else. What a normal Tuesday involved, who they worked with for twenty years, the closure or the takeover, what they were good at that nobody outside would understand. A few weeks into retirement, while it's all still close, is the easiest point to ask. More on that below.

What to think twice about

• Joke retirement gifts. The mug and the "officially retired" T-shirt belong to the office. From family they read as not having thought about it.
• Anything that fills their time for them. A year of weekly classes booked without asking is someone else's timetable, just when they got theirs back.
• A big trip in the first month, unless they've asked for it. Some people want to stop moving for a while first.
• Gadgets that need setting up. If it needs an account and a password, it needs you to set it up and explain it again a month later.

Asking about the working years

Retirement is one of the few points where a parent will happily talk about work, because it's finished. Ask a specific question rather than "so what was it like?" and you'll get more than the stories everyone has heard already. The free questions to ask your parents list has a work-and-money section to start from, and how to record your parents' life story covers asking without it feeling like an interview.

“What did you do on your first Monday after you stopped working — or, if that day hasn't come, what would you like to do with it?”

StoryPrompt asks a question like that once a week, by email, for a year. Eight of the 52 are about working life and what came after it: the first job and what it paid, the job they stayed in longest, the strike or closure that changed things, which part of work they missed and which part they didn't miss for a second. The rest cover childhood, family, home and everything else. Their answers, in their own words, collect into a typeset book you can download for as long as StoryPrompt runs. £25, paid once, not a subscription.

If the retirement lands on a round birthday, 70th birthday gift ideas covers the birthday side. If they're the sort who already has everything, see gifts for grandparents who have everything.