It's a Dad's Life:We've had many column inches devoted to resolutions and new starts over the last couple of weeks, writes  Adam Brophy.

My monsters, of course, are still too young to grasp the nature of a change in year. To them, this is just another week. They know there is something unusual about it because we are on holiday and doing our best to extend the Christmas buzz into January, but they have no expectation of change that many of us hope for right now.

Wouldn't it be great if we could maintain that roll of life into adulthood? If we didn't have to worry about breaking down the years and our lives into small segments at the end of which we expect to have achieved something new?

We get to the end of December, look back at the year and take stock. Have we moved on, have we improved, are our lives immeasurably superior to the way they were 12 months ago? To prepare then for the onslaught of the new year, we make our professions of change and lay out our forecasts for the next 12 months. We tell ourselves we'll lose a stone and get that promotion, move house and upgrade the car. We will be wealthier and thinner than we are now.

I want to not care. I want to concern myself about the future in the way my two-year-old does.

Okay, her only concerns are who is going to feed her next and that hopefully one of her parents will eventually realise her nappy is stinking, put down the newspaper and change her. I suppose that will come to me, whether I like it or not, in my last days, but for now the younger doesn't see beyond the now.

For a child, today is everything; tomorrow is a new world you wake up in each morning, where you manage the cards you have been dealt. She doesn't have to budget for her future or worry about self-improvement, she knows it will come.

Would anarchy erupt if we were all to adopt the toddler model, would nation states collapse and Microsoft crumble? Or would some semblance of momentary order surface that could accommodate the mercurial whims of each individual's changing needs? It would require us to move forward in regressing backwards.

The buzzword for 2007 may well be mindfulness. While all around us are warning signs to ease off the spending throttle as interest rates rise - to appreciate what we already have - it would appear that the idea of being mindful is ready to take hold. If only the word itself could be changed, because already it smacks of the loony left in which, it appears, I am well established.

"Being mindful" may be an understandable "way of being" to the organic-vegetable-buying, separate-paper- and-plastic recycling brood of south Dublin, but your average taxi driver (the yardstick of all social behaviour and public opinion) will tell you to be mindful of adding a tip.

So, how can the concept be made more acceptable? Call it the toddler theory or the notion of rampant nowism?

Well, whatever label we put on it, here's what I advise. Put down your self-help books, grab a child (if you don't have one of your own, make sure to get the parents' permission) and ask them how they do it. When they look at you perplexed, let them go and simply stalk them for a week or two.

You should have learnt enough by the time you get slapped with the restraining order. If you have no child/model to work with, mine are available for reasonable rates.

Since getting involved in the parenting game I have often heard other fathers claim that they learn more from their kids than they teach them.

Until now I remained sceptical, but, armed with my new theory of re-toddlerisation, I predict great things for 2007. Sorry, I mean each day will bring its own wonders as I readjust to wearing a nappy.