Some day, in addition to taking your child’s temperature if you think she’s sick, there might come a time to take a child’s cortisol level to see if the arguing between you and your husband (or your ex) is stressing her out.

Researchers know that children who get upset when their parents fight are more likely to have later psychological problems. Science Daily reports that cortisol, a stress hormone, may be a culprit, and also a good marker.

Three universities — Rochester, Minnesota, Notre Dame — collaborated on the study, which looked at 208 mostly white 6 year olds and their mothers. The “arguments” were not face to face, but simulated arguments on the telephone. During and after the call, the researchers measured the child’s distress, hostility, and level of involvement in the argument. They also asked the mothers to record what kind of behavior they saw at home when there was an argument between the parents.

Don’t worry: no needles were involved. Cortisol can be measured with a simple saliva test. And the children who seemed most distressed by the mock argument showed higher levels of cortisol.

"Because higher levels of cortisol have been linked to a wide range of mental and physical health difficulties, high levels of cortisol may help explain why children who experience high levels of distress when their parents argue are more likely to experience later health problems," said Patrick T. Davies, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, who led the study.

The poll our site ran last week shows that the vast majority of our members feel that if the parents are truly unhappy, it never makes sense to stay together “for the sake of the children.” Children clearly suffer when there is tension in the home.

When are children acting in their parents’ best interests? And when are children acting in their own best interests? Usually these questions come up in billion-dollar cases, like the one with Anna Nichole Smith and her husband, J. Howard Johnson, 63 years her senior.

Who’s to say that Anna Nicole Smith, a former Playboy playmate, did not make the last years of Johnson’s life in Texas a lot happier, even if they never lived together?

Ok, let’s leave that extremely messy question behind.

Next question: if a penny-pinching widower named Claude Thomas, age 87, secretly marries Susana Martinez Ramirez, 45, in 2001, and if she spends a lot of his money on things like cars for her ex-husband and clothes and such, who is to say that Claude Thomas is not happy to be throwing some money around, including in her direction.

Why of course it’s his children. They say that their father amassed $1.5 million by being frugal. And that his second wife has spent down that estate to a mere $165,000 since their marriage in 2001. And so they petitioned the court to force their father to divorce his wife.

Although Claude Thomas had exhibited some early signs of dementia, in court he said that he was happy with his wife, and her spending habits. He had met her when she was pushing a tea cart in a local restaurant. After that she came to help clean his house. And even though she doesn’t speak much English, and he doesn’t speak much Spanish, they found comfort in each other after Thomas’s wife died.

Somehow, two years later, in 2001, Thomas and Ramirez got married. His children claim that there was no sign of the marriage. And that she didn’t live with him.

For every bride who discovers she had an ally, a mother-in-like, after the wedding, there are those who realize they have a monster-in-law. My monster-in-law gave me a fuzzy sleep suit with a big zipper up the front the first year of our marriage, possibly the least sexy piece of clothing ever. I felt like the Easter bunny. It was royal blue.

But the mother-in-law in the beautiful coastal town of Ravello, on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, must have been a doozie. The Italian press was all over the story of a man who got his marriage annulled this week because of interference by his wife’s mother. One Italian newspaper talked about mother-in-laws who put themselves between husband and wife, “with the docile tenderness of a Rottweiler.”

The Italian press readily conceded that it’s usually the husband’s mother, and not the wife’s mother, who acts like a Rottweiler. Last year a poll by Eures, a job portal on the internet, said that 3 out of 10 Italian divorces were due to "the unusually close attachment of Italian men to their mothers." The mothers sometimes move in, take care of the house, and often criticize their daughter-in-law’s housekeeping, cooking or child rearing.

This case was not nearly as severe; it hinged on an oral contract. Antonio Paolillo, a car dealer, was set to marry Maria Assunta Gemma Criscuoli in 1998, and there was a little bambini on the way. Paolillo, 27 at the time, apparently was apprehensive about his mother-in-law-to-be. So just before the wedding he told his bride, 21, that she had to keep her mother out of their marriage.

If not, he said, he would get a divorce.

The population of Costa Rica is 76 percent Catholic, and it has showed in its laws, which forced couples to stay married for three years before they could get a divorce. (Chris Kattan would have been sunk.) The country almost reached Sharia levels when it allowed men to remarry right after divorce, but forced women to wait 300 days, or have a pregnancy test.

Costa Rican law protects life “from the moment of conception,” and interprets this so strictly it will not even allow the “morning after” pill to be advertised there, since it prevents implantation in the womb.

A pregnant woman, it seemed, had to wait 10 months after divorce to make sure that one man’s children wasn’t going to be raised as another’s. Thus the ban for women on remarriage within 300 days of divorce.

All that changed earlier this year, when the 300-day waiting period for women was eliminated by the Sala Constitucional (Constitutional Court), making women and men equal.

Earlier this month the Constitutional Court ruled unanimously that the requirement to wait three years after marriage before filing for divorce “violated the rights of an individual” and “deprived a person of his or her liberty to rebuild their lives.”

From now on, a couple in Costa Rica can marry one day, realize their mistake, and divorce the next. It won’t be easy, of course. It’s never easy.

But it will be easier than miserably staying married while living apart.

Back in 1979, mothers almost always got custody; joint custody was so rare it was almost unheard of. But one Minneapolis husband and wife pushed the courts (it helped that the husband was a lawyer) to consider their wishes to share parenting. In an interview with the father and daughter 30 years later (the mother died of cancer in 1994) Minnesota Public Radio revealed how beneficial joint custody can be.

John Bujan and his wife, Nancy Stein, decided when their daughter was 4 that their marriage wasn’t working. Molly Brom, that daughter, now 36, remembers riding in the car with her parents when they told her they were separating.

Her first question: Would her father still come to her birthday party? He did.

They separated for a year, during which time Molly went to kindergarten and spent three nights a week at her father’s home and four nights at her mother’s. The parents felt the situation was working beautifully, and said that to the referee when they filed for divorce.

The referee, on the other hand, discouraged them. “Why do you want joint custody?,” he said. “These things just don't work out.”

In the 1970s, with the divorce rate hitting an all-time high, the conventional wisdom was that children of divorce would end up delinquents, or misfits who would never make a lasting connection to another person. But Molly’s parents fought for and won joint custody.

It was so revolutionary then that The Minneapolis Tribune ran a story about the family in 1979 with the headline “After Marriage Break-up, Children Can Still Live with Two Parents.” It seemed almost an answer to the bitter divorce portrayed in that year’s Kramer V. Kramer.

She was beautiful, and had a 5 year old daughter with her husband, the actor Danny Huston. She committed suicide this month before their divorce was even final, but the divorce did not “cause” her suicide. What caused it was bipolar disorder.

Katie Jane Evans, 35, was a born and bred English beauty, and her husband, 46, was the illegitimate son of the director John Huston and the English actress Zoe Sallis. They married in 2002, and moved to a house in the Hollywood Hills, in California, while Huston appeared in movies like How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. They visited Huston’s half sister, the actress Anjelica Huston. She was friends with the aristocratic Emma Parker Bowles, who also lived in LA.

Life seemed glamorous and exciting. Then things turned bitter.

The divorce proceedings, which she filed in California last year, were fraught with charges and countercharges. He used drugs. She tried to commit suicide with pain killers and alcohol, and had gone into rehab. He wasn’t capable of caring for their child. She wasn’t capable of caring for their child. She told Huston’s talent agent that she was bipolar, and had hidden that from her husband for their entire marriage.

Bipolar disorder is a serious mental illness also called manic depression; people with a severe form live chaotic lives on the edge, take risks, have periods of exhilaration and wild creativity, followed by deep depressions. Some 20 percent of the most seriously afflicted commit suicide.

Despite the acrimony, the terms of the divorce were settled amicably: Huston gave her their Hollywood Hills house and $17,500 a month, half his income, and they agreed on shared custody of their daughter, Stella.

But, her friends said, she went into a deep depression over the end of her marriage.

Guys, won’t you learn from experience? Tim Mahoney won his US Congressional seat after Mark Foley, the previous representative from the district in Florida, resigned. Why? The bachelor Foley had sent sexually explicit emails to congressional pages, teenage boys. Sex scandal!

Now Mahoney, 52, who came to office two years ago with the campaign slogan “Restoring America’s values begins at home,” has admitted to sexual affairs (plural), and a payoff to a former mistress.

Mahoney, who lives in Palm Beach Gardens, is, unlike Foley, married. And, although his wife, Terry, stood by him a week ago as he admitted that he had created “pain” in his marriage, she now, no surprise, wants a divorce.

Mahoney admitted paying a campaign worker and former mistress, Patricia Allen, and her lawyer $121,903 to prevent a lawsuit over sexual harassment. A second relationship was also charged: Mahoney had an affair with a Florida woman who came to Washington to get FEMA aid for a 2004 hurricane. She got a $3.4 million federal grant.

Since Tim and Terry Mahoney have been married for 22 years, and he was a wealthy venture capitalist and computer marketer before he was a Congressman, and they have a daughter, Bailey, in college, and he has already admitted to adultery, and she campaigned hard for him when he sought election, Terry would presumably get a generous settlement.

For one thing, her court papers say, obviously referring to the $121,903 payoff, Tim Mahoney “recently sold jointly owned real property,” put the proceeds into his own account, and “dissipated funds from said account.”

Those were marital assets. Her divorce petition says that she is “in need of temporary, lump sum, rehabilitative and permanent periodic alimony, which the husband is well able to provide for.”

Rep. Mahoney lists his net worth as between $3 million and $12.7 million.

By all accounts the Divorce, Separation Support Group of Raleigh, North Carolina, is a terrific bunch of people, both men and women, at least 600 members, who meet once a week to give advice and help each other. The group was betrayed last January by a Fayetteville woman, Margaret Irene Haithcock, 51, who got $6,241 out of them by lying.

She came to the group and announced that she had a triple tragedy that had put her in debt. Her son had been killed in Iraq, she said, and she had cancer, and needed further treatments at Duke. Also, a fire had burned down her house and her letters from her son who was killed in Iraq.

The group, in response, held several fund raisers for her and actually had a memorial service for her son.

But it turned out that none of that was true.

An arrest warrant was issued in June, charging her with obtaining property by false pretenses. The warrant said that the claims of her illness and a dead son were offered only as a way to get money from the group. It took authorities more than two months to find her.

Haithcock, who is also known as Margaret H. Cooke, was arrested last month. According to records at the North Carolina Department of Corrections, she has a history of arrests and convictions dating from 1984 to 1990. She was imprisoned, most recently, for six months in 1990 on forgery charges. Other charges included credit card fraud, credit card theft, attempted forgery, and cheating on property services.

Haithcock/Cooke pleaded guilty on Thursday (October 9) to the charges, and has been ordered to repay the divorce support group. She was given three years of probation, fined $200, and ordered to undergo a mental health assessment.

Finally, she was told not to be in touch with the support group ever again.

What no one has made clear, however, is whether or not Haithcock/Cooke lied about another thing: Was she ever divorced?

In Florida, there is no such thing as “joint custody”; instead it is called “shared parental responsibility.” The person given custody is technically the “primary residential custodian” and the other parent is the “secondary residential custodian.”

Why? Because courts around the world are trying to remove inflammatory words from family law, in hopes that will make divorce less fractious. In 2005, France eliminated any gender bias in the language in its divorce laws. It treats mothers and fathers as exact equals, except in one area: a wife may take back her maiden name.

As long ago as 1991, the British courts changed the language for custody, in an attempt to remove the sense of ownership that went along with the word “custody.” Because of that, 17 years ago, “we heaved a collective sigh of relief,” said Jonathan Smith, a family lawyer in Great Britain.

The problem, he said, was that the courts were using the new terms “parental responsibility,” “residence,” and (for the parent who does not live with the child) “contact” time.

But, he said, regular people, and the press, continued to talk about "custody" and "access" to the child.

And yet, people keep trying. In 2001, the Minnesota legislature adopted new language for custody and visitation, ahem, “in an attempt to lessen the animosity in custody battles.” One parent is the “primary caregiver,” but both parents are apportioned “parenting time.”

Even in New York, where we and everyone else have endlessly referred to “custody” in celebrity cases, like the Christie Brinkley-Peter Cook divorce, the actual terms are “residential custody” to one parent, making the other parent the “non-residential parent.”

Married men are 7 percent more likely than married women to commit adultery. And when a man has an affair, he doesn’t seem to consider the consequences of his actions. So says a study to be published in the fall, “So What Did You Do Last Night? The Economics of Infidelity.”

Infidelity for women peaks at 45, the study found. For men, it peaks at age 55.

Gee, what 55-year-old confessed adulterer has been in the news this week?

John Edwards, who claimed a week ago that he at least had been “99 percent honest” in his statements about the young filmmaker Reille Hunter.

“… [A] wealthy, famous politician such as John Edwards is a man with plenty of opportunity, and it seems that he gave the costs of getting caught little consideration. [That] fits well with our findings,” Bruce Elmslie, an economics professor in the Whittemore School of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire and a co-author of the study, told Firstwivesworld.

The study, co-written with Edinaldo Tebaldi, assistant professor of economics at Bryant University in Rhode Island, was based on data from the United States General Social Survey.

It is unusual in that it looks at infidelity from a cost-benefit analysis, rather than a sociological or psychological point of view.

Other points made in their study:

1. Men who are more likely to commit adultery:
• Live in cities (where there is greater opportunity to escape discovery)
• Do not have a college degree
• Do not belong to any particular socioeconomic group

2. What men do not take into account when having an affair:
• The economic status of the new woman, or her ability to bear children
• Their wife’s educational level
• Religion

"As with spousal education, men don't weigh the costs — spousal quality or eternal damnation — when deciding whether or not to have an affair," Elmslie said.