His method is based on what he calls ‘the structured last word.’

Aportly man in a gray sweat suit stood at the front of a large and nearly empty auditorium Monday afternoon, shaped his bearded face into a scowl and held up two pieces of 1-by-3-inch paper with words printed on them in block letters. One said, “Nevertheless,” and the other said, “Regardless.”

Those two words, he said in a deep and authoritative voice, can restore a parent’s control over the most rebellious of children.

Admittedly, the context was a bit odd. But these were not the ramblings of a fanatic, at least not the nutty kind. Instead, it was the prescription of a man named Gregory Bodenhammer who left his job as an Orange County probation officer because he didn’t think he was personally doing enough to stop the wave of bizarre and sometimes violent juvenile behavior building up around heavy metal and punk rock music.

Bodenhammer started a program called Back in Control to work directly with the families of children who lie, steal, run away, smoke dope, cut school or do any of the other things teen-agers do to make their parents and society unhappy.

Like a similar program, Toughlove, Bodenhammer’s focuses on tough parental response to a child’s rebelliousness. But he said his program is different because he requires parents to keep their children at home--demand that they stay at home--no matter how badly they behave. The program often works with youths who are on probation, giving parents the legal clout to make that demand.

Art Tantardino, director of the East Valley probation office, thinks the program works and would like to get it started in the San Fernando Valley. He hired Bodenhammer to give two four-hour workshops Monday in the Panorama Center in Panorama City.

The turnout wasn’t overpowering. About 25 people came to the first session at 8 a.m. Thirteen showed up for the afternoon session.

Among them were several probation officers, including Tantardino, his wife and one of his four teen-age children. Their demeanor didn’t suggest that they needed the strong behavioral techniques that Bodenhammer advocates.

But two or three other couples in the auditorium volunteered problems of their own for Bodenhammer to comment on.

His response was as simple as an Oriental philosophy, and as complex.

His method is based on what he calls the “structured last word.” It works like this:

If a child wants to go to the AC/DC concert on a school night, just say, “No,” and explain the obvious reasons, he said.

“Do I expect the kid to say, ‘You’re right, Dad’? he asked. “That’s not going to happen. What’s the response?”

A tall, attractive woman in a red sweater knew.

“Everyone else is going,” she said.

Bodenhammer cast her the look of a deeply disappointed parent. “Regardless, you can’t go,” he told her. “Anything else you’d like to say?”

That was a structured last word.

“Who’s in control if I have the last word?” Bodenhammer asked. “If you do this, it’s like a sponge. It just sucks up the argument. Never argue with the kid.”

But what should she do, the woman in the red sweater wanted to know, when her daughter tells her: “I’m going to go anyway.”

His advice: Pick her up at school that day and, if she slips away, pursue her with the force of law.

“You tell me how she’s going to feel when her daddy, a security guard and two policemen walk up to her and say, ‘Come with me,’ ” he said.

Bodenhammer told the parents to forget about punishment as a tool.

“Punishment is effective most against people who don’t need it,” he said. “Punishment brings us right back to the beginning, when the kid’s in control. The kid uses the punishment back on the parent.”

Bodenhammer wasn’t trying to revive the old liberal-conservative debate over permissiveness.

He suggested some pretty tough ways of not punishing a child. In his plan, children who don’t earn their parents’ trust get locked up in their own homes.

“If you can’t trust him not to do dope, does he deserve to go out of the home?” he asked.

Trust should be earned back slowly, he said. He suggested a limit of one-half hour of free time a day for a week or two.

“If he does that 10 days, then we add half an hour to his time,” he said.

Several of the women said they didn’t know if they could force their sons to stay at home.

“It’s the physical part of it,” one slightly graying woman said. “It’s too late.”

Bodenhammer said it was not.

“We tell parents to stand in front of the door,” he said. “Hold the child to the best of your ability. In the process, you may get hit, kneed, kicked, hair pulled, have an ashtray picked up and bashed into your face.”

At that point, he said, dial 911 and tell the operator: “I have just arrested my son for battery,” and then make sure the officer takes the child away.

“We want the kids to know that, if mom says, ‘Stay in the house,’ they’re going to stay in the house.”

And, once they know that, he said, the words nevertheless and regardless will be all the tools a parent needs.

As his audience filed out, several purchased copies of Bodenhammer’s book, “Back in Control.”

He urged them all to pick up handfuls of the little sheets of paper, free.

“Please take the regardlesses and the neverthelesses and post them all over the house,” he said. “I’ve got plenty. We print them by the tens of thousands.”