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.

Madonna is about to find out that she can’t flex her muscles when it comes to her soon-to-be ex-husband’s parenting style. The self-described control freak reportedly gave a list of rigid rules documenting what Guy Ritchie could and couldn’t do when he has sons Rocco, 8, and David, 3.

The list reportedly included a ban on TV, no Miley Cyrus for these boys, no non-organic food such as microwaved pizza and soda, nor any clothes that were not 100 percent cotton and sent by her. She even wanted her total blessings on what water they drank — Kaballah preferred — and no toys that are “spiritually or ethically unsound.”

What this sounds like is a recipe for disaster.

Divorced women tell me all the time that the hardest part of divorce is not leaving the husband but leaving the kids with him. And if you, like Madonna, are used to control, it becomes agony to realize the limited power you now have over your ex-spouse’s parenting style. It’s as though handcuffs have been put on you just when you thought you were finally liberated.

“Moms go nuts about this but all they can do is write to Dear Abby or Firstwivesworld,” says noted divorce lawyer Raoul Felder. “The courts will not mini-manage or arbitrate parenting styles unless it involves safety or basic acceptable serious judgment issues.”

Such as?

“Other than allergies like peanuts, religion and sky diving, the hand of the parent who turned the kids over for their weekend with Pop has about as much to say in what the kids do there as Bush does in the choice of the next Secretary of State,” Felder says. “But isn’t that what week-end Dads are all about? Lot’s of hot dogs, chocolate and crummy blood and gory movies.”

A 50 year longitudinal study of 17,000 people in Great Britain, the National Child Development Study, has concluded once again that children of divorce are more likely to struggle academically and have emotional problems, are usually less well educated, and are more likely to divorce themselves.

But as Tolstoy said, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” And unhappy families, whether they divorce or not, have unhappy children.

Consider what life was like in one Italian family that is now facing divorce.

The mother and father face five years in prison for completely refusing to consider the effects of their incessant arguing on their 12 year old son as they pursued a divorce. Italian privacy laws have withheld the names of the parents, but not their behavior. Prosecutors in Milan have asked the judge, Cesare Tacconi, to charge the mother and father with mistreating a minor.

The child, prosecutors say, had a "syndrome of anxiety and depression" that prevented him from concentrating in school. When a court-appointed health worker visited the home, the report said the son seemed “disturbed,” had fallen behind in school, and believed, with some evidence, that his parents hated each other.

The prosecutors said, "Each blamed the other for shortcoming and educational errors in bringing up the child."

The parents, the report said, used the child as a psychological punching bag in their battle. It is the first such charge in a European court. Judge Tacconi will decide in December whether or not the case should go to trial.

No word on whether mom and dad have managed to get a divorce yet.

Despite everyone’s assumptions, E! Network has renewed Denise Richards’ “It’s Complicated,” a reality show inspired by her contentious divorce from "Two-and-a-Half Men" star Charlie Sheen. As divorced women know, this life event can get complicated — but some break-ups have more drama than others.

And Richards divorce makes the title “It’s Complicated” perfectly apt.

Richards and Sheen have been battling in the tabloids since their break-up in 2006. Complicating matters, after she split from Sheen, Richards started going out with Richie Sambora, who was married to her friend Heather Locklear.

Richards told Larry King that she “did not break up the marriage” because Locklear had already filed for divorce. “Richie and I were friends and they were going through their divorce,” she said.

Her divorce alone provided plenty of material for the first season of her show. It averaged 1.1 million viewers a week, which is why E! has made a commitment for a second season.

Recently, Sheen unsuccessfully fought to prevent their two young girls, Sam and Lola, from being part of “It’s Complicated.” But Richards won that battle and claims she is not exploiting them.

“In making a decision to do a reality show, I needed to commit to that and I wanted it to be real,” she told King. “And the reality is I’m a single mom to two little girls. The show is not about my children. They aren’t featured in the show. They’re in it very little. We’re just doing every day life and it’s being filmed.”

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.

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?

The material girl is going to pay some Madonnamony. That is our term for when a female celebrity like Madonna has to pay manimony in excess of $30 million. It was reported this weekend that Madonna and her soon-to-be-ex husband Guy Ritchie are close to an agreement on assets and custody arrangements.

Ritchie, who has been married to Madonna since December of 2000, will probably get the 1,200 acre country estate in Wiltshire — worth $25 million — the English pub called Punchbowl in Mayfair, worth $4 million, and another $17 million in cash in exchange for her keeping their townhouse in Marylebone, London, the house next door and two mews cottages. It’s clear the RocknRolla director, who is now shooting Sherlock Holmes in London with Robert Downey Jr., will not be hurting financially, although reports say that in return for the money he’s agreed not to talk about his marriage to Madonna.

Madonna will keep her New York and Los Angeles homes as well as her cash — hundreds of millions — and her cachet of being such a popular and enduring superstar. According to The Sun, "the negotiations were relatively painless." Guy knew what he wanted and “Madonna knew what she was keen to keep. There was a spell when Guy was in a mood to dig his heels in, but he decided this arrangement seemed reasonable and a long battle over money would make life unbearable."

Although Madonna’s publicist said that the details are not final, reports in The Sun and The Daily Mail indicate that Madonna is likely to get custody of her son with Ritchie, Rocco Ritchie, 8, and David Banda, the 3-year-old they adopted from Malawi. Ritchie will have liberal visitation rights with the boys, who will live with Lourdes Leon, 12, Madonna's child with Carlos Leon.

After going through the stress of many in vitro fertilizations, I vivdly remember signing a paper giving the unused embryos to scientific research. In my mind, it was the least I could do since, thanks to this modern day miracle, I could possible conceive the child I so desperately wanted.

But I also realized that the pain — both physical and emotional — of this process could also break couples apart. It was right there in front of me, as I witnessed the cumulative strain on people in the waiting room.

What, I wondered, would happen to their embryos if indeed they broke up? A woman on fertility drugs can produce as many as 20 or 30 eggs. Who would get them?

The nurses would smile and tell me not to worry about it, especially since my husband and I were, they said, such a happy couple. Naturally the reporter in me wanted answers. Where exactly did the embryos go? Did they go into one large unpatrolled laboratory where a rogue nurse would sell them elsewhere. And then, in years to come, I'd meet my lookalike in the mall.

Yes, I know, it seems like something out of a Robin Cook medical thriller, and I laughed at how fertile my imagination could be. So did the nurses. Everything, they assured me, was properly monitored and nothing could happen to the embryos without both parents’ consent.

With in vitro fertilization (IVF), doctors usually implant no more than four fertilized eggs to prevent high-multiple births. In Oregon, a divorced couple split on what to do with their six frozen fertilized eggs, and the case ended up in the Oregon Court of Appeals.

Laura Dahl and her former husband, Darrell Angle, had stored their “embryos” with Oregon Health and Science University, where she had undergone IVF. (For the sake of argument, the court called the fertilized eggs “embryos,” although they said that, technically, they would become embryos only once implanted in a woman’s womb.)

You are parents forever, even after divorce. That conventional wisdom resonated this week with the new dust-up between Peter Cook and Christie Brinkley. As we reported this week, Cook apparently violated a confidentiality agreement by deciding to appear on 20/20 with Barbara Walters tonight.

Brinkley swiftly tried to then bar the philandering father from seeing her two children, Jack and Sailor, this weekend.

But a Long Island judge played Solomon and found a solution. Cook can take the children but as Brinkley's lawyer explained, he "has to be away from his home and he can't expose them to the 20/20 broadcast."

Cook claimed he wouldn’t have exposed the children in any case, but the children are seen in the 20/20 broadcast.

A person close to Cook said, "I find it silly that someone who not only allows her children to be in the media but encourages it would have a complaint like this."

The people who should have a complaint are the children.

I’m glad that Sailor and Jack have each other as confidantes since they are caught in the middle like fish in a net while their parents continue their hostilities. Children want to love both parents, and when thrown into an ocean of he said/she said charges, they are left confused, conflicted and hurt. At least they have each other as they swim through these murky waters.

That is no small thing. Often siblings in divorce form enduring bonds.

Forgiveness is difficult when you are co-parenting after a hostile divorce. Christie Brinkley clearly didn't want to have those wounds reopened by a Barbara Walters interview with her ex.

Some women wish they’d never been married. We’re sure Sandra Boss, the London management consultant whose 7-year-old daughter was famously kidnapped in July by her ex-husband, must feel that way.

But wait. What if she was never married?

Now we begin with the quote marks: Boss “married” her “husband,” “Clark Rockefeller” (born Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter), in 1995 in a small Quaker ceremony in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Nantucket is real. So are Quakers.

Somehow they got divorced, last year, in Boston, and a court-appointed evaluator gave custody to Boss. “Rockefeller” refused, we’re told, to reveal his actual identity, and Boss gave him $800,000 in go-away money.

So Rockefeller (we’re quitting with the quote marks now) grabbed his daughter on a supervised visit and has since said that he just wanted to spend some quality time her, like the rest of their lives.

He was arrested in Baltimore, and returned to Boston, where several other identities became known.

Now that authorities are trying to figure out what charges to lodge against Rockefeller – being a jerk, liar, phony, and weasel not being statute crimes – they have petitioned to see the sealed divorce and custody papers.

But Rockefeller’s lawyer, Stephen Hrones, argued that the papers should remain sealed, because they contain “private” and “personal” information. Besides, he said, "They weren't legally married. How do you divorce when you're not legally married?"