Good Cop, Bad Cop : It really doesn’t matter whether it’s Mom or Dad who dishes out the discipline. But parents should support each other and stay consistent.

David Van would prefer that parents skip this article. The 5-year-old doesn’t want them to know his system for keeping kids out of “trouuuu-ble.”

It goes like this:

* Hide from Mommy and quietly wait for her to give up looking for you.

* Let Daddy find you.

* Hang your head low and pretend you’re a sad puppy.

* Wait for Daddy’s frown to soften. When it does, say, “Daddy, I looovve you so much!” in a wounded voice. Or try, “You’re the best daddy in the whole wide world!”

* If that fails, cry your head off.

Ta-da! Daddy’s forgotten why he’s supposed to be mad at you. Parents Pat and Paul Van describe their son’s system with humor and exasperation. David confirms it with giggles, vigorous nods in the affirmative and shy shouts of yesses.

“Daddy lets Mommy handle most of the discipline,” admitted Paul, 43. “That’s because Daddy’s a softie. I don’t know what to do when David gives me his sad look.”

“Not me. I know when David’s being a poop,” said Pat, 41. “That’s why I’m the tough guy. The villain.”

This is how it works at the Vans’ Bellflower home. In some households, roles are reversed. But increasingly, dads are earning reputations as the softies while moms are “the bad guys,” “the bad cops,” “the meanies,” according to psychologists, sociologists, teachers and parents.

They attribute this to changes in the family, spurred by high divorce and out-of-wedlock birth rates. This has resulted in the boom of single-parent families, headed mostly by moms, according to a recent study by the Population Council, a nonprofit research group in New York City.

This has made it more socially acceptable, compared to 20 years ago, for moms to express their authority, experts said. Couple this with an increased national interest in fatherhood, in which psychologists and politicians are urging dads to nurture and spend more time with their children, and “discipline is slanted toward Mom,” said Shari L. Thurer, a counseling professor at Boston University and author of “The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother” (Penguin, 1995).

“Now,” Thurer said, “rarely is it, ‘Wait until your father gets home.’ ”

Think of television’s Roseanne. When isn’t she complaining to Dan about his inability to discipline? asked Muriel Savikas, a licensed clinical psychologist in Manhattan Beach who specializes in family issues. TV is fiction, she acknowledged, “But it often reflects what’s going on in society--and it’s definitely not the ‘Father Knows Best’ style of discipline.”

Go ahead and ask today’s kids: Who would you rather get busted by, Mom or Dad? An informal poll of two dozen children--tots through teens--revealed: “Dad!” Younger kids laughed. And teens stared, baffled by the stupidity of such an obvious question.

“Shoot, that’s easy,” said Tyler, a 14-year-old from Venice. “I like my mom and all. She’s nice and all. But when I do something to make her mad . . . shoot, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

His dad isn’t home much, Tyler explained. “When he is, he doesn’t want to ruin anything, like our time together. So we just usually hang and watch TV. Then Mom comes in and yells at me for not doing my homework, and she yells at Dad for not telling me to do my homework. It’s like, ‘Whoa! Take a chill pill.’ ”

It doesn’t matter which parent is the disciplinarian or softie, said Joel Foxman, a clinical psychologist in Palos Verdes. What matters is that parents discuss how they will discipline. And then support each other.

Otherwise, Foxman said, “There will be big fights in their relationships.”

He knows this from working with couples who had serious marital problems because one person harbored “so much resentment for the parent who always gets to be Mr. Nice Guy. It’s actually quite a common problem.”

But it’s a problem that can be worked out, Foxman added. He’s seen couples from different cultural or ethnic backgrounds, who had opposite ideas about a parent’s disciplining duties, succeed in saving their marriages.

“I tell them that children can be quite flexible. They can cope readily with two parents who have two styles of discipline as long as their roles are consistent,” he said. “I tell them to respect each other’s methods and always, always maintain composure.”

Even single parents can waver between being good cop or bad cop, said Andrew F. Blew, a clinical psychologist in Torrance and an assistant professor in UCLA’s child psychiatry department. Mom might be strict with her daughter at home but lax when they’re shopping at the mall.

“It’s natural for a parent to want to play one role or the other,” Blew said. But he added that a single parent has to be especially careful to avoid split-parenting--flip-flopping between good guy and bad guy behavior. “It’s confusing for the parent and the child. It’s totally exhausting for the parent.”

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Marsha, divorced five years ago, said disciplining her infant daughter was easy.

But everything is different now that her only child is almost 7, said Marsha, a 40-year-old lawyer from Manhattan Beach. “I’m the doormat,” she said. And her ex-husband, who shares custody, is “the authoritarian.”

It all makes disciplining even trickier, Marsha said. “It’s hard for [their daughter] to adjust to our different styles” of discipline, she said. “It’s hard for me to determine which one is right.”

Both parents recently completed a parenting class in the South Bay. They concluded that Mom could stand to get tougher and Dad to loosen up.

As with most things, such a balance is ideal, said Lewis P. Lipsitt, professor of psychology and medical science at Brown University in Providence, R.I., and director emeritus of its Child Study Center.

“Parents don’t have to be one or the other,” he said. “Parents can be firm and fun.”

Jenny Waggoner’s parents were on opposite sides of the discipline question. “My mom always did the disciplining,” said Waggoner, 22, a recent graduate of Claremont-McKenna College. “I didn’t like her scolding or her criticizing.”

With her father, she said, “It was easy getting out of trouble. The secret is looking cute. My dad would be nice to any kid who was cute.”

And just how cute was she?

“Well, I don’t remember being sent to my room.”