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.

Let’s cast the movie in our minds. Shirley MacLaine could play Rebecca Willis, the dirty dancing granny. No, MacLaine is too old. Meryl Streep?

Rebecca Willis was back in the news last week after being awarded $275,000 in a settlement with the town of Marshall, North Carolina. That comes some seven years after being banned from the town community center for dancing in a "sexually provocative manner — gyrating and simulating sexual intercourse with her partner.”

She was suggestive. She was lewd.

She wore short skirts.

She exposed her panties, or worse!

The townspeople (the population is 831) said their children would be scarred for life. They didn’t just ban Mrs. Willis, they banned her “for life.”

Why? Because Rebecca Willis was a 56 year old divorced woman. And when the townsfolk asked her to tone it down, she just danced some more.

For her, it was a matter of freedom of speech. At least that’s what her lawyer, Jon Sasser, argued, after she found him through the ACLU. So the case was argued, appealed, argued, appealed. Up and down the courts for five years, during which time the dancing divorcee got married again.

Now 64, she gave a little dance of joy after the settlement (out of which she will have to pay her lawyer). She considers it a victory, even though she had to promise not to dance in the town center again. “It just tickles me to death,” she said.

The most recent decision came after her lawyer asked the town to prove she wasn’t being singled out. Jon Sasser told First Wives World that much of the town’s attention seemed focused on the fact that Mrs. Willis was divorced.

“Some witnesses testified that she was fine when she was married, but became wilder after her divorce,” he said. “There was definitely an undertone of jealousy.”

“I’ve been trying to sell this house for two years,” Chris Wealty said. He dropped the price from $850,000 to $599,000; still no interest. The house sits empty, once home to a married couple. They are trying to divorce, but settling the financial terms depends on selling this house in College Park, a neighborhood north of Orlando, Florida.

So he decided to advertise. On a large (and not very attractive) sign in the front yard, he wrote “3,400 sqft Lake View House: $599,000. Helping me get divorced: $ priceless $. 407 592 4964 (Husband)”

As he told the Orlando television station WESH, he and his wife had been married for 17 years, and had been in negotiations for several years over a divorce settlement. The house is in one of the nicer areas, former orange groves surrounded by lakes near the well-known Winter Park. It is not far from the modest bungalow where Jack Kerouac wrote Dharma Bums, a home that is now a writer’s colony.

But a nice four-bedroom, three bath house, a pretty view, a good neighborhood have not been enough. Housing prices in Orlando, which went up 34 percent from 2004 to 2005, have now dropped by 20 percent. One leading real estate expert, Robert Schiller, says Orlando prices will drop another 30 percent this year.

Thus Wealty’s desperation. If he doesn’t sell the house soon, he said, he faces foreclosure. One of his neighbors opined that putting up a sign airing dirty laundry was kind of “white trashy,” so the experiment hasn’t endeared him to the community. But his life, and his wife’s life, have moved on.

When asked what his soon-to-be-ex wife thought of the sign, Wealthy answered: “Well, to tell you the truth, I'm not real sure. We don't talk much these days except through lawyers.”

No kidding.

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 British comic John Cleese has felt, three times, that it was time for something completely different in his personal life. He is divorcing wife No. 3, the psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger Cleese, after 15 years of marriage. In a recent interview with The Times of London, he had some bitter things to say about divorce, and some funny things to say about marriage.

This marriage was his longest. His marriage to Connie Booth lasted from 1968 to 1978, and the one to Barbara Trentham lasted from 1981 to 1990; both included a daughter.

That is Gripe No. 1 in this divorce. “I'm paying more than £1 million a year right now,” he told the newspaper. That’s $1.6 million at today’s exchange rate. He said, “And we never had children.”

He has also given her $10 million in marital property, which is presumed to include their $1.5 million apartment in New York. But he would hardly be left homeless. Cleese has four homes in California, three in London and a villa in Jamaica.

He has said that if the weather in California could be dragged to London, he would never leave London. But, alas, London is dreary so he spends much of his time in California, or Jamaica.

Gripe No. 2: He is 68, and he’s going to have to keep working to pay spousal support. But keep in mind, work for him is doing voice-overs for animated films, playing Chief Inspector Dreyfus in "Pink Panther 2", due out next year, and doing other films; making various television shows, and appearing in comic but inspirational business training videos.

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.

Few women at the age of 47 are up for posing in the December issue of Playboy. But then Carol Alt was not only the Face, but the Body, a star on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue back in 1982. And since she’s a raw food fan, she still looks great.

But life has not always been kind to Carol Alt. She married the hockey player Ron Greschner in 1983, right after the Sports Illustrated cover. But, she now says, in court papers filed in September, that she “could not conceive” because she had cervical and uterine cancer, and “because Greschner strongly desired children.”

The divorce was amicable, he remarried, and as Grechner notes in court documents: "I have since remarried and have five children.”

They legally separated in 1997, but lived together for two more years. It was all, court papers say, “very amicable.” And the divorce was final in 2001.

So why are Alt and Gretchner filing court papers today? She says she has questions about a business deal from 1997 that should have paid her $980,000 plus interest.

Gretchner says his entire profit on the deal was $800,000 and the separation agreement clearly awards that money to him. Gretchner says, “I believe that she continues to harbor resentment towards me and the desire to have information about me."