You cannot teach a child to regulate if you are dysregulated yourself. Queen D. Michele spent 27 years in classrooms before founding the Fula History & Genealogy Society in America. She joins host Jeremy Rivera to explain why Generation Alpha is growing up emotionally dysregulated and what it would take to hand them the tools.
Queen D. Michele taught for 27 years, which means she watched the change happen in real time rather than reading about it afterwards. The environment a child regulates inside now includes a screen that never turns off and an attention economy engineered against calm.
Her framing is not that children are worse. It is that the tools were never handed over, and the adults holding them are struggling too.
That third one is the load-bearing claim of the whole conversation. Every regulation programme aimed only at children is building on a foundation nobody checked.
Her programme, 52 Insights for Gen Alpha, takes the five core SEL competencies and turns them into a personal, AI-adaptive journey rather than a fixed syllabus.
The design choice worth noting is the adaptation. Social and emotional learning delivered as one curriculum to thirty different children assumes they all arrive at the same place. They do not, and that assumption is why so much of it fails to stick.
A free online pilot starts on 8 September.
Guided meditation is what she calls the big gun. It is the intervention with the shortest distance between doing it and feeling the difference, which matters enormously when the audience is children who will abandon anything abstract.
The other thread running through the episode is her return to her ancestral village in Guinea-Bissau. It is where the generational-trauma argument stops being abstract.
The Fula History & Genealogy Society in America grew out of that work. Knowing where a line comes from turns out to be part of regulating the people currently on it.
| Entity | What it is |
|---|---|
| Queen D. Michele | Retired 27-year educator, founder of the Fula History & Genealogy Society in America |
| 52 Insights for Gen Alpha | Her AI-adaptive social and emotional learning programme, free online pilot from 8 September |
| The five SEL competencies | CASEL’s framework for social and emotional learning |
| The matrix | Her first nugget: the inherited systems a child never agreed to |
| Generational trauma | Her second nugget, and the reason the Guinea-Bissau thread is in the episode |
| Guided meditation | What she calls the big gun |
| The decade of return | Her journey back to her ancestral village in Guinea-Bissau |
Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.
She writes at her Substack. The Fula History & Genealogy Society in America, the 52 Insights pilot and her LinkedIn are all linked above.
Queen D. Michele. Interviewed by Jeremy Rivera. “Giving Gen Alpha the Tools to Regulate a Dysregulated World.” Unscripted Green & Non-Profits, 2026. https://unscripted-green-non-profits.castos.com/episodes/giving-gen-alpha-the-tools-to-regulate-a-dysregulated-world
Somebody wanted to hear the Brahms Double Concerto played live and could not find anywhere to look it up. That is the origin of...
Benjamin Behrooz of Branding Los Angeles builds brands for blue-collar and home-service businesses, and one of his most consistent recommendations is the one most...
David Wilson, executive vice president at Zozimus, has been doing this since AltaVista. His argument is that search engine optimisation has become search everywhere...
