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.”

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.

Rebecca Romijn knows a thing or two about X-Men and wants to set the record straight. In an interview with Page Six magazine, Romijn, who starred as Mystique in the X-Men movies, refuted rumors that her divorce from John Stamos happened because she didn’t want kids.

“There is absolutely no truth to that,” said Romijn who has a recurring role in the hit television show Ugly Betty. “I desperately wanted kids. I was never a girl who dreamed about what her wedding day would be like, but I’ve always dreamed about decorating my baby’s nursery.”

Well, her dream is coming true. Now happily married to Jerry O’Connell, who played a detective in the TV series Crossing Jordan, she is seven months pregnant with twin girls and looks, as she says, like a “beached whale.”

Romijn was married to Stamos (best known from ER) from 1998 to 2005. But one can suppose that she may have had lingering doubts about the relationship, and wanted to wait until she was certain about the marriage before building a family. Sometimes you don’t really know someone until you live with them for a while. They can be fun boyfriends or even a romantic husband but a wife might wonder if they have the qualities to be a good family man.

As for O’Donnell, Romijn said, “I knew early on he would be a fantastic dad. He’s a pragmatic, smart, savvy, enthusiastic person. He really lives his life with tremendous integrity and he’s a healthy person in every single way.”

The couple married in 2007. O’Connell had to backtrack on a comment he made on Conan O’Brien’s show in September, when he called his wife “huge.” He told People magazine, "I meant to say that there are specific areas of my wife that are larger than normal and growing every day. All other portions of my wife are quite petite. I apologize to her and will be coming home with flowers."

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.”

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.”

All divorces involving children under 18 in Connecticut, Arizona, and Utah (and many counties across the country) require the husband and wife to attend parenting classes. No, not together.

But Thomas Dutkiewicz, of Bristol, Connecticut, filed suit saying he shouldn’t have to attend such a course.

His argument: Who said he didn’t know how to parent? And why isn’t there a decision made on the merits. Requiring such parenting courses, he said, was like convicting a person without trial. And, he said, it is the state interfering in family matters, and would violate a parent’s right to decide what’s best for a child.

This week the Connecticut Supreme Court, in a unanimous ruling, confirmed the right of the state to require such courses. It rejected Dutkiewicz’s appeal, saying such parenting classes reflected “a compelling state interest by aiming to maintain familial harmony through a difficult transition.”

As for a constitutional right to decide family matters, the court pointing out that parents were not required to follow the advice offered in the classes.

It should be noted that, because of a technicality, Dutkiewicz was never required to take the course when he and his wife divorced in 2006. (If both parents and a judge agree, attendance can be waived; the six-hour course in Connecticut costs about $125 a person.) But Dutkiewicz, who by all accounts has the necessary parenting skills, wanted to make a case of it.