If author Kasey Edwards had one piece of advice to parents of girls, it would be to instil in one’s daughter the value of her own opinion.

“How many times a month will your child come to you for feedback – ‘Do you like my drawing? Do you like my summersault? Do you like my outfit?’” said Edwards, during a lively discussion on parenting at Guardian Australia’s monthly online book club on Friday.

“We can give them our advice and our opinion, and by doing so, we will reinforce their view that our opinion matters more than theirs. If they are going to thrive in this world and like themselves, they need to know that their opinion matters most about them.”

Flipping the question – “What do you think?” – teaches girls to “live by their own standards, not the standards imposed upon them” Edwards said.

Guardian Australia’s first book club for 2021, an interactive forum held over Zoom in partnership with Australia at Home, offered gems of parenting advice based on the synthesis of rigorous research and the wisdom of lived experience. Madonna King is the author of Ten-ager: What Your Daughter Needs to Know About the Transition from Child to Teen, and Kasey Edwards wrote Raising Girls who Like Themselves (in a World that Tells them They’re Flawed); together, they joined panel chair and Guardian Australia features editor Lucy Clark, also the author of Beautiful Failures.

In what Clark called an “urgent conversation about the wellbeing of our children,” topics covered in the hour traversed issues of self-esteem, friendship, technology, teenage rebellion, parental mollycoddling and the stress of competition. Across these divergent topics ran a thread emphasising the importance of self-confidence that comes from within.

King conducted hundreds of interviews with mothers, fathers, teachers and 10-year-old girls. Out of the 500 teachers she interviewed, “100% said the thing they most want more of [in young girls] is self-confidence” she said; for girls “to believe they’re enough”.

There is an “overwhelming push by our girls to put a ceiling on their potential”, King continued. “Boys don’t think like that, and we’ve got to teach our girls to get rid of that ceiling.”

Almost 400 people joined the discussion on Zoom – and one asked King why it was different for boys.

“Girls take things personally,” King replied. “Boys often will see a maths mark as a mark on a page, where girls think, ‘I’m hopeless at maths.’”

King advocated “best practice” approaches based on research: “We seem to think parenting comes naturally. Good on you if it did, but it certainly didn’t to me.”

Edwards offered the distinction between “stone” and “seed” parenting. A “stone parent”, she said, will have a perfect vision of what their child should be – being able to read before they start school, and excelling on the sporting field. “Seed parenting” on the other hand, involved trusting that “we already have the beautiful child they’re meant to be”, and providing “the infrastructure for them to grow in their own way and in their own time”.

It required bravery, said Edwards, “to put down our chisels and pick up our watering cans”.

• Ten-ager by Madonna King is out now through Hachette; Raising Girls who Like Themselves by Kasey Edwards and Dr Christopher Scanlon is out now through Penguin. Guardian Australia’s book clubs are held monthly, hosted by Australia at Home