Brandy Madsen, a security officer, approached a group of five teen-agers on one of her regular Friday night sweeps here inside the Mall of America, the country's largest shopping center.

With a crispness befitting her uniform, she asked them, "Are you all aware of our parental escort policy?"

Then Ms. Madsen, 21, began checking ID's. It was 6:30, half an hour after the mall's curfew for unchaperoned youngsters under 16.

Then the situation took a potentially unpleasant turn in a way that has been repeated countless times in the four-year-old mall. One of the young men hurled an obscenity at the guard and started to edge away. Shoppers began to stop and stare.

Then Ms. Madsen turned to her secret weapon: her partner, Va-Lesha Beeks, 25, who was wearing a baseball cap reading "Mighty Moms."

Ms. Beeks, who has two children and is eight months' pregnant with her third, put her hand on the young man's shoulder and shushed him with a finger to her lips.

He told Ms. Beeks that he had been "harassed by the cops" eight times in recent weeks because he and his friends are of Cambodian descent.

"I promise you that's not why you were checked, and I'm sorry if we disrespected you," Ms. Beeks said. "We know you're good kids, but we've got to check everybody because otherwise it would be discrimination."

The young man nodded and dug out his driver's license: he was 19. "Have a good night," Ms. Beeks said, then chatted with him for a few minutes about new movies.

"Sometimes you need the authority of a security officer to make things right," she said when all was quiet, "and sometimes you just need a mom."

That wisdom is at the heart of the Mighty Moms program, which was inaugurated by the Mall of America last spring to help keep order at the 4.2-million-square-foot city of 520 stores and a seven-acre amusement park.

Forty million people will visit the mall this year, and they make up a cross section of the acquisitive that ranges from wealthy shopping junketeers flown in from Switzerland to bus commuters from Minneapolis-St. Paul, 15 miles away.

On a Saturday night, the mall becomes the third-largest population center in Minnesota. And in the past, as many as 5,000 of those Saturday night visitors were unsupervised young people. Groups of 50 would often block store entrances or move en masse through the hallways. In 1993, shots were fired in a dispute over a jacket. And earlier this year, a gun was pointed at a tourist caught in the food court in a chase between groups of black and Asian teen-agers. One gruesome joke that arose from the incident was that the mall should change its slogan from "Put some fun in your life" to "Run for your life."

Then last January, a group of mothers was recruited from local community-service agencies, churches and school groups to join the mall's 150-member security force on patrol. The 20 mothers, who receive $20 an hour for five-hour shifts, are armed only with training in what they call "verbal judo."

Cases of actual violence are handled by uniformed guards and the Bloomington police, but the mothers are especially effective in heading off incidents that can be defused better with a friendly chat than with with a badge. And since September, the Mighty Moms have been supplemented by 10 fathers, called Dedicated Dads.

So far, the combination of the curfew, now two months old, and parental involvement seem to be working. "Last year at this time there would be 10 kids arrested every weekend night for fighting, and now we have none," said Teresa McFarland, the mall's spokeswoman. The Bloomington Police Department has cut the number of officers on duty at the mall from 12 to 6.

"The Mighty Moms have a lot to do with that success," said Richard Mammen, a director of Change Inc. in Minneapolis, an urban-policy consulting group hired by the mall to help with youth relations. "We know some kids don't respond well to authority figures, especially ones in uniform. But usually they will listen to a mom. The mall used to have a lot of kids using bad language, running or harassing visitors, and now it's down to a bare minimum."

The Mighty Moms program is the first and only one of its kind in the nation, said Mark J. Scholfet, the spokesman for the International Council of Shopping Centers, in New York. "The approach of using parents to help patrol malls is being watched carefully by others in the industry," he said.

Those faced with keeping youngsters in line at the Mall of America might emulate Lynn Jones, a Mighty Mom who has four children. As she checked ID's near Knott's Camp Snoopy amusement park, she said: "Look at me -- I'm not dressed in a threatening manner. So I can walk up to some group and say, 'Look guys, knock it off!' And kids will say, 'Yes, ma'am,' instead of mouthing off. If I'm on an elevator, and I hear profanity, I can say, 'Hold it -- you're disrespecting me.' And they will stop."

James Perry, 41, a Dedicated Dad who has a 19-year-old son, said his philosophy was: "When parents drop their kids off, they're asking us to take over their parental duty. That's what we do; we put limits."

The idea for the Mighty Moms came to Virgil Heatwole, the mall's associate general manager in charge of security, when he was watching a basketball game on television. "One of the players said, 'Hi, Mom' into the camera while he was being interviewed," he recalled, "and it struck me that everybody listens to and respects mothers."

On this particular Saturday night, as Sammie Reine, a 35-year-old Mighty Mom, escorted a 14- and a 15-year-old boy out of the mall for a bus ride home, she said: "They haven't indoctrinated us, and the pay is a great perk. They only legitimized us as mothers. It's cool to say I get paid really well for my qualities as a mom."

When the curfew first went into effect, many civic leaders expressed concern that the policy was racially motivated because of the large number of black teen-agers who congregated at the mall on Saturday nights.

But Clarence Hightower, the president of the City Inc., a nonprofit agency with programs for teen-agers in Minneapolis's two main black neighborhoods, said that while the young people he knows don't like the curfew, "it has nothing to do with black and white -- they feel that it is an intrusion to have their parents with them at the mall." "One thing we do as a people is respect our elders," added Mr. Hightower, who is black, "and in a real sense the Mighty Moms can diffuse a lot of trouble that can start at the mall. To introduce the notion of elders into policing just makes sense."

Sharon Sayles-Belton, Minneapolis's first African-American Mayor and an early critic of the curfew, singled out the program for praise. "Who better than moms?" she said. "It's hard to sass or be mean to somebody's mom. It's a very effective strategy."

The program's popularity comes as no surprise to Flurnia Hadley-Davis, 45, a grandmother of four, who was stationed at an entrance near the mall's bus station. "We know some of these kids and parents from the community," she said. "So when we approach them, we get a whole different reception than a security guard. They won't say, 'Forget you -- I can do what I want,' when we know their mothers. I use that line a lot: 'I'm calling your parents.' "

Mr. Heatwole, the mall official, said, "If we saw a band of youths starting to cause problems, we'd sic the Moms on them. They'd round them up and say: 'Why are you doing that? What would your mother say if she knew you were doing that?' "

Ms. Madsen, the security guard, said that she was learning from the Moms. When she first started sharing her patrols, "I didn't know what to expect," she said, adding: "But I started learning from the Moms immediately. Now when I go into a situation, I try not to be just someone in a uniform yelling. I try to be a role model, too."

Jenny Mohn, 18, of Inver Grove Heights, Minn., was one of the teen-agers whom Ms. Jones, the Mighty Mom, stopped and asked for identification outside a record store on Saturday night. Eye-rolling and exasperation soon gave way to friendly conversation when Ms. Jones asked her how she managed to get her hair that particular shade of pink.

"It's hard to be a jerk to a mom," she said after the encounter. "I got stopped last night outside of Bloomingdale's by a security guard, and I got mad and gave him some attitude. But with the Moms it's like, 'O.K., I'll do what you want.' "