A teen gets arrested for shoplifting, for example, or is in a fight at school. What’s a parent to do?

Men and women representing some 25 families attended a Youth Against Violence parents’ session November 19 to learn how to deal with their children, many of whom were court-ordered to attend the program because of infractions they’ve committed.

Assistant Chief of Police Gary Sparks said it was the largest crowd to date, and he seemed pleased with the parents’ involvement. Their children meet Saturday mornings at Jessie Davis Park. Parents meet Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. at the Municipal Court building in downtown Douglasville.

Sparks leads the program along with Sgt. Ken Winklepleck of the Police Department and Arthur Powell, a former drug-dealing gang member.

Their goal is to educate parents and teach them about the gang, sex and drug laws the youths are learning in the program. They also want to empower the parents.

“We want you to know that you have every right to go into your kids’ room and find out what they are doing, what they are watching, what they are listening to,” Sparks said.

Thursday night, several of the teens came, sitting alongside mothers, who outnumbered fathers three-to-one.

That tied in later to a message given by Rodney Johnson, a professional comedian who supports the program.

Johnson spoke on several aspects involving raising children, drawing from his own experiences as a child and his role as a father, starting by telling a story of how as a child he could get five whippings in one day from one single incident.

Example: Miss Alice would tell the neighborhood kids to “get out of that tree.” Johnson, being the smart mouth, might say, “You not my mama!” Not only would Miss Alice tan his behind, but so would his mother, father, grandmother and grandfather when they found out about it.

That was community-raising, Johnson said.

But what really struck a chord was the part about women as head of households having to raise up sons and men’s responsibility for being in their sons’ lives.

“It’s very hard for women to be both the father and the mother,” Johnson said. “Where are the men? When I go around (to groups) talking to boys and girls, the men are missing.”

Johnson said women were not designed to be both the man and the woman. Women, he said, are nurturers and lead from the heart. And, while they build up their son’s self-esteem, they sometimes do more harm than good.

“He can’t stand because he is depending on you. You are the crutch,” Johnson said. “Why are you still reinforcing stuff that’s not positive to keep building up his self-esteem?”

Johnson used the singer Charo as an example, an entertainer with whom he has performed aboard cruise ships. Charo had given her son anything and everything he wanted, according to Johnson, but the son still was unhappy and ungrateful. His advice to Charo as well as to mothers in the audience: Whatever hurts you will be good for him.

Speaking to the women (again), Johnson told them there are only two relationships women have with men: a physical relationship and a relationship of substance. He also talked about the imbalance in the family causing it to crash and women paying the mortgages and allowing men to move in and be irresponsible.

He made his case by using TV and movie families — the Evans’ family on the ’70s sitcom “Good Times” as a cohesive family unit (before the father died); the family in the 1991 movie “Jungle Fever” as an example of a dysfunctional family — all to the sounds of laughter and amens from the audience.

“To make the family survive, you need a balance between the father and the mother,” he said.

But after the laughter, the stories and the personal experiences, Johnson said it all boiled down to choices. This time, he spoke to the teens in the audience as well as the parents, picking out a couple of young men, one with earrings in both ears and one with multi-colored hair and gothic-style clothes.

“Being a parent is difficult, but you have to make choices,” he said. “Then you have to give them (children) the information that they need so that they can make better choices.”