I'm certainly not alone in believing that emphasizing a child's self-esteem at the expense of providing honest feedback is a counter-productive practice.  The problem is, I'm not a scientist or a researcher of any type so I've never been able to provide any evidence to back up that belief.  According to this article , though, researchers are looking at the impact of the self-esteem movement and discovering that my instinct is correct -

Dweck and Blackwell’s work is part of a larger academic challenge to one of the self-esteem movement’s key tenets: that praise, self-esteem, and performance rise and fall together. From 1970 to 2000, there were over 15,000 scholarly articles written on self-esteem and its relationship to everything—from sex to career advancement. But results were often contradictory or inconclusive. So in 2003 the Association for Psychological Science asked Dr. Roy Baumeister, then a leading proponent of self-esteem, to review this literature. His team concluded that self-esteem was polluted with flawed science. Only 200 of those 15,000 studies met their rigorous standards.

After reviewing those 200 studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement. It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.) At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”

Now he’s on Dweck’s side of the argument, and his work is going in a similar direction: He will soon publish an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further. Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: It’s so strong that “when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.”

  If your own experience hasn't convinced you, let me put it in simple terms - Success takes hard work and commitment, regardless of one's intelligence or natural ability.  Teaching your children anything different is not doing them a favor.  Better to teach them how to deal positively with set-backs and disappointments and how to capitalize on their strengths and overcome their weaknesses in order to succeed in life.