Good morning to all new and old readers! Here is your Wednesday edition of Capital Ideas, exploring four startup ideas and five success stories from the last week to help you find your next business or investment.

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Today’s edition:

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Alex

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Ideas

1: Parenting Copilot

You can’t teach — or practice law, medicine, or become a pilot — without first proving your skills. But you can become a parent without any training at all — and that’s a high-stakes position.

When you consider the fact that most of today’s parents learned their skills from a generation who grew up when the word, “Emotional Intelligence” wasn’t invented—you can see how we might run into problems.

Without implying that parent’s are to blame, our kids and young adults are in need:

• Limited financial security, cost of higher education and fewer intimate relationships mean that young adults are living at home longer. The rate in July 2020 peaked at 52% – the highest level on record (the pre-Covid high was 47% in Feb 2020).

• In 2021, more than 4 in 10 (42%) U.S. high school students felt persistently sad or hopeless, and nearly one-third (29%) experienced poor mental health. These rates highlight a significant decline in mental well-being among teenagers.

• In 2021, marriage rates in the US hit an all-time low of 5.1 per 1,000 people, with men in the bottom third of incomes experiencing the greatest decrease (over 30% are less likely to get married).

It’s hard to argue that well-equipped, emotionally competent parents wouldn’t help buck some of these trends. There are a few ways to attack this:

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