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.

• Three nuggets structure the episode: the matrix, generational trauma carried in DNA, and the fact that unconscious adults cannot teach consciousness.
• 27 years of classroom evidence. This is not a theory arrived at from outside the school system.
• 52 Insights for Gen Alpha turns the five SEL competencies into a personal journey, adapted by AI rather than delivered as a fixed curriculum.
• The free online pilot starts 8 September. Which is the practical reason to listen now rather than later.
• Guided meditation is the big gun. Her words for the intervention that does the most work.
• The screens never turn off, and that is a different environment from the one any previous generation regulated inside.

• Why Gen Alpha is dysregulated
• The three nuggets
• 52 Insights and the five SEL competencies
• The big gun
• Guinea-Bissau and the decade of return
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

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.

• The matrix. The systems and defaults a child inherits without ever agreeing to them.
• Generational trauma carried in our DNA. The idea that what was not processed gets passed down rather than resolved.
• Unconscious adults cannot teach consciousness. The one that does the most damage in practice, because it puts the work back on the grown-ups first.

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.