The best advice I ever received as a new parent was simple: When in doubt, just get down on the floor and roll around.

Unfortunately, doing so makes me what my own dad would have called a nincompoop. He was a great provider for his kids, but not frequently inclined to get down on our level, which worked for us, since it would have been like finger painting with Clint Eastwood.

It only took me a few months of being a dad myself, however, to figure out that nincompoopery may be the greatest skill I bring to the parenting project. When it comes to caring for babies, dads are at a distinct disadvantage, not unlike the shortest guy on the basketball court, who usually becomes one of the best players on the team through sheer hustle and smarts. This is lucky for new dads, because with babies in the house, hustle often equates to being a goofball, and in this so many of us are blessed with raw talent.

Daddy Rules columnist Dan Coleman and his children, Ray and Zia

For instance, unlike my wife, I couldn’t make food with my own body when my infant son needed a snack and screamed like he was starving to death. But I could put underwear on my head. Before my own kids came along I had never changed a diaper, but all my years nerding out on atlases in the library gave me a list of exotic place names to blurt out and baffle them with as my fingers fumbled around: Azerbaijan! Aracataca! Addis Ababa!

But a life of buffoonery takes its toll. When my wife recently expressed her chagrin that our 2- and 4-year-olds had succeeded in getting me, a card-carrying wallflower, out on the dance floor — a feat she had rarely accomplished over the previous decade — I had a simple answer: Since they had already stripped me of all human dignity, what was left to lose?

How embarrassing could anything be after I’ve yodeled “The Lonely Goatherd” along with Julie Andrews to distract my daughter? What shame is left to those of us who have chased our offspring all the way to the pins at a bowling alley? Or turned back around from paying at a restaurant to find one dragging the other across the floor by the ankles all the way to their favorite booth? Or held one as he screamed to the point of choking on his own tears and snot, simply because I didn’t have another piece of gum, in those toxic minutes on a landed airplane when the human traffic jam standing in the aisle waits to disembark, no escape in sight from a tantrum so intense we all expected the Department of Homeland Security to storm the plane at any moment?

Nope, not enough shame left here to prevent a little public shaking of the tail feather, even if Dirty Harry wouldn’t approve. At least my generation has onscreen role models like Ty Burrell, better known as “Modern Family’s” Phil Dunphy, who is a nincompoop for the ages, but also a dad willing to find fun in the thankless toil of parenting, and sacrifice himself when needed for comic relief at his own expense.

Phil Dunphy’s tough guy father-in-law, Jay, is usually there to bust his chops for it, but Jay stands in, too, for the harsh judgment we can inflict on ourselves from past generations of our own families as we knew or imagine them. I often wonder about my male ancestors: If rolling around on the floor with babies wasn’t something they went in for, what would they think of a guy like me, who willingly has chosen to spend half the work week at home with my kids, the first I know of in my entire family tree to have done so?

I try to read a verdict in their old photos, what I know of their lives. My grandfathers — the corner grocer and the elevator mechanic — and my own dad, collared, starched, and stressed: Did they work so hard, for so many years, so I could do this? Are they proud or ashamed? Did they miss out? If they had it to do over, would they roll around on the floor a little more? Pummeled to delirium one day down here beneath the human puppy pile, I thought I saw a ghost. But ghosts never answer the questions we put to them. I never did see who it was, anyway, since its face was covered by the wastebasket it dumped on its head. Then it floated away, bounced off the wall for a farewell laugh, and disappeared.

— Dan Coleman is secretary on the board of Dads of Douglas County. He is a part-time stay at home dad with a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old, but in his other life he is a librarian at the Lawrence Public Library, where he selects children’s and parenting books for the Children’s Room.