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.

Logic tells you that if you are a stressed-out pregnant woman, somehow that anxiety will become your baby's norm, and even seep into his or her personality. But for a long time, no research confirmed that. Well, until now.

Professor Marta Weinstock-Rosin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem School of Pharmacy has been fascinated with this subject her entire work life, and now her experimental work with rats has demonstrated the connection in a conclusive, laboratory-tested manner.

"There is an enormous advantage in working with rats," says Weinstock-Rosen. (No, she's not talking about cheating ex-husbands but the animal kind.)

Researchers were able to compare offspring of stressed rat mothers with offspring whose mothers were not stressed. They also were able to compare the results of administering various types of stress at different periods during gestation to see which period might produce which behavior.

And guess what they discovered?

Stress during pregnancy caused developmental and emotional problems for the rat pups, included impaired learning and memory, less capacity to cope with adversity and symptoms of anxiety and depressive-like behavior.

Weinstein-Rosin says that all these symptoms parallel impairments that occur in kids born to mothers who experience stress during pregnancy.

According to Science Daily, further experiments by Weinstock-Rosin and her students have shown that the culprit was the hormone cortisol, which is released by the adrenal gland during stress and may reach the fetal brain during critical stages of development.

Brad Pitt says he'd love to marry Angelina Jolie, yet is frightened by the prospect of another divorce, reports web site myparkmag.com.

The actor's 2005 divorce from Jennifer Aniston was traumatizing enough that Pitt is apprehensive to attempt a second marriage.

Turns out, Pitt is not alone in his fears — or his choices. An Australian study released this summer revealed that most men would prefer to be single than face the possibility of divorce, reported Reuters.

Author Carl Weisman conducted the study as research for his book, So Why Have You Never Been Married? Ten Insights into Why He Hasn't Wed, to combat the assumption that there's something wrong with bachelors. Weisman concluded that lifelong single men made the conscious choice to avoid the pain and difficulty of a failed marriage.

Says the article:

"Men are 10 times more scared of marrying the wrong person than of never getting married at all," said Weisman.

Having endured a divorce, Pitt is aware of the toll the process can take, which would probably make anyone less likely to try again, don't you think?

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.

On the campaign trail, Gov. Sarah Palin proudly holds her baby son, Trig, who has Down syndrome, and promises “to help families who have children with special needs.” You don’t have to know trigonometry to realize what that adds up to.

Gov. Palin addressed that issue in a speech today in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to groups that deal with special needs. " ... [T]he truest measure of any society is how it treats those who are most vulnerable," she said, and brought up another way special needs has affected her family: her sister Heather has a 13 year old son with autism. Gov. Palin proposed three ways to better serve families with physical or mental special needs children:

• School choice for parents, with federal funding that will follow the child.

• The full funding of government's obligations under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act

• Strengthening the National Institutes of Health, to work on long-term cures and providing better information to families

Gov. Palin also urged extending the Vocational Rehabilitation Act to teach special needs children the skills they need to live independently. But having a special-needs child not only requires expensive, life-long therapy for the child — it requires marital therapy as well.

A little-known fact is that the divorce rates for parents with special-needs children is tragically high. According to the documentary Autism Every Day, the divorce rates for these parents soar to as much as 80 percent. A recent study in The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology revealed that parents of a child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are nearly twice as likely to divorce by the time the child is 8 years old.

And when I contacted various special needs organizations to get a figure for divorces, spokespeople were reluctant to give a firm number, but acknowledged that it’s “very high.”

The divorce rate in the United States may be high, but Korea's is quickly gaining. The Korea Times reported a case of a woman who faked a pregnancy to fool her partner into proposing to and marrying her. Once he discovered the truth, he took her to court.

The snag? The 29-year-old woman did, in fact, become pregnant shortly after they were married — but before she told her 30-year-old husband the truth about the phantom baby (got that?). Now she's officially pregnant, he's moving out, and a local Korean court is considering adding "false pregnancy" to its list of grounds for divorce. (The Supreme Court recently changed its "adultery" definition, as we reported last month.)

Divorce among the young is soaring in Korea. In May, news web site english.chosun.com reported that there has been a 50% increase in young divorce since 2000, and men aged 15 to 24 held a rate 10 times higher than the entire male married population.

Perhaps is the long-standing 100-day marriage tradition? Many men propose on the 100-day anniversary of the couple's first date. Despite a dating in modern society, many Korean men succumb to familial pressure and cultural traditions such as this to guide relationships. Divorce doesn't seem far off, does it?

Ever notice the girls who mature quicker?

It's easy to chalk it up to an evolving society. Everything happens quicker, faster, earlier for the generations that follow. Exposure to the media, the Internet, and an immediacy for information puts our children (or in some cases, our children's children) in fast forward.

New research, however, shows that environmental factors of early puberty might hit closer to home than you think.

International studies have cited divorce as the culprit behind a range of medical conditions, from asthma and eczema to diabetes — in addition to deteriorating the environment.

Now you can add early puberty to the list. The University of Arizona, in conjunction with New Zealand's University of Canterbury, studied the effects of absentee fathers and divorce on adolescent development, and found that young females without a positive paternal influence developed earlier — sometimes as much as one year's difference.

Early puberty has been linked to teen pregnancy and various health issues, including breast cancer.

Researchers haven't determined why this is so, but have suggested an evolutionary biology link. Says the University of Arizona article:

"The idea is that children adjust their development to match the environments in which they live," Ellis said. "In the world in which humans evolved, dangerous or unstable home environments meant a shorter lifespan, and going into puberty earlier in this context increased chances of surviving, reproducing and passing on your genes."

The Washington Post recently reported on Japan's declining marriage rate. Short story: Men are looking to wives to take over maternal roles, and that scenario isn't very appealing to most single Japanese women:

"There is the rarely stated but almost universal expectation of Japanese men to be fed, clothed and picked up after. 'I am willing to take care of and give comfort to a man whom I care about, but that does not mean I want to be his mother,' she said."

In fact, WaPost found that women who had married were less likely than their male counterparts to remarry after divorce. The article states that post-divorce, men are unhappy and remarry quickly, while "the women are relatively happy and often delay remarriage." Perhaps it's the "burn me once" theory?

In addition to the lack of women looking to take on the mommy role, a stalled economy and a posh home life are keeping adult children in their parents' homes. A Calgary Herald piece from early August reported that Japanese parents — fed up with housing, feeding, and taking care of their single adult children — were taking matters into their own hands and organizing events exclusively for parents to find mates for their children.

"A government report from 2005 showed 71.5 percent of men aged 25 to 29 were unmarried, compared with 47.1 percent in 1990. For women, 32 percent from 30 to 34 years of age were single, compared with half that number in 1990."