I don't mean to divert the thread from the original topic but I do want to start with a post to Withit...

One thing that therapists have learned is that the way children act in the presence of their parents can be quite different from how they act when their parents aren't around.

I'll give you an example with fear of school... Lets say it is the first day of school and the kid has never been to school before. What kids do is assess the situation via their parents emotional responses. If the parent is very anxious about leaving their kid then the kid can pick up on the parents anxiety (kids are amazingly smart) and because their parent is anxious the kid thinks there must be something to fear and so the kid gets upset.

Is it normal for a 9 year old to cling to her Mother?

In some circumstances, sure. But I guess I'm wondering how much of her anxiety was due to your anxiety. This is not at all to blame you. That point is really important.

I'm just thinking that what the therapist was attempting to do was see how your kid responded to her saying 'you aren't a baby you are a big girl'. What the therapist was trying to convey was 'I'm not going to treat you like a baby and tell you what to do. I trust that you are grown up enough to have your own thoughts and feelings and opinions and we can work together to figure out what is going on'. I know you say that you felt upset at the therapist saying that. I guess I'm wondering how much of your kids upset was in response to your upset rather than in response to what the therapist was saying, however.

I'm saying this because I've read some stuff about strategies that therapists can use when working with kids around your kids age. This strategy is one of them and it can work to good effect indeed. I think that it is an accepted strategy for working with kids your daughters age. Just to suss out what is happening with respect to your daughters anxiety... Whether there was some kind of rapport with what the therapist was saying or what.

If you didn't know it was a common strategy (which you did not) I surely do understand your concern that what she said didn't seem to be particularly validating.

Sometimes... Have you ever seen a little kid (toddler) fall over hard and then look around to assess the situation? What I've noticed is that if the parents go 'oh you poor thing oh sweetie oh' then the kid will ball its little eyes out. If the parent goes 'oh that was a whoopsie daisy' or something similar and swoops them up and distracts them by drawing their attention to something else 'look at this over here...' then often times the kids don't cry.

The latter strategy might seem invalidating of distress... But... In this case the validation seems to be what causes the distress.

Does this make sense?