When your child’s feelings are bigger than they are

• A fear with a name to it: the dark, the dog next door, the school gate.
• A change they are not landing well, whether a new school, a new city or a new baby.
• Clinginess, and real distress when your attention goes somewhere else.
• A short fuse, and a temper that arrives faster than they can stop it.
• The same mistake, repeated, with the lesson never quite sticking.
• Somewhere else entirely, dreamy, hard to call back into the room.

The honest reason parents are drawn to this is safety, so that is the part to be precise about. Bach Flower essences have no pharmacological action. There is nothing in them to overdose on, nothing to interact with a medicine, and nothing to withdraw from. That is a claim about what they are, not a claim about what they achieve.

What a consultation is really doing is helping you describe your child’s state more exactly than "difficult" or "sensitive". Bach’s categories are a decent vocabulary for that, and being able to tell fear of a specific thing apart from difficulty with change is useful to a parent regardless of what you give them.

I consult with the parent. For younger children you know things about them nobody else can tell me, and the description we work from is yours.

A selection is personal, so this is not a list to work through yourself. It is here so you can see the distinctions the system actually makes, which are finer than the single word most of us use.

• Mimulus

  Fear

  Fear of a thing you can name: the dark, the exam, the phone call, the illness.

• Walnut

  Oversensitivity to influences and ideas

  Steadiness through a change: a new school, a new city, a new shape of family.

• Chicory

  Over-care for the welfare of others

  Clinging, needing to be needed, and hurt when the attention goes elsewhere.

• Cherry Plum

  Fear

  The fear of losing control, of snapping, of doing something you would not choose to do.

• Chestnut Bud

  Insufficient interest in present circumstances

  Making the same mistake again, and again, without the lesson landing.

• Impatiens

  Loneliness

  Everything and everyone moving too slowly, and the irritation that comes with it.

A consultation is about 60 minutes online, in English, Hindi or Punjabi, for ₹400. You can read what actually happens in one before deciding, and what the research does and does not support.

• AnxietyWhen the worry will not switch off
• BurnoutRunning on empty, and still running
• Sleep and overthinkingThe thought that starts when the lights go off