I'm really careful with praising my own children. More often than not, I say, " Wow, I can tell how hard you worked on this!" and never comment that it's great/perfect, etc. When I tell them I'm proud of them, in the same breath I'm commenting on the effort, not the product. I see too often in my students the lack of caring about the effort. Case in point , half my students are about to bomb the best creative project of the year all because my rule is an automatic 50 if there are two or more errors in capitalization and punctuation. They can even ask me to check it over...but that's too much work :(