You may also enjoy reading Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck. She writes about how our parental responses to a child's efforts effect them and recommends praising effort rather than results. There's a lot more in the book and I found it very helpful.
I heartily second the suggestion of reading Carol Dweck, though the book I read and liked was Self-theories - I posted about it and there was a little discussion in
this thread.
A related (in my mind at least) book I read much earlier which had a profound effect on how I think about these issues is Alfie Kohn's
Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes. The message here is that, counterintuitively, praise (perhaps even for effort) may be just the wrong thing, because it is an evaluation of the child by the parent, and giving it encourages dependence on other people's evaluations. What we want is for our children to rely on their own evaluations of how they're meeting their own goals, and to do this it is better (he says) to show interest and love, but avoid evaluation, even positive evaluation, as much as possible. Controversial, but spoke very strongly to me.
