Parents: How can we instill both self-esteem and a desire to succeed in our children?

It seems that in America today there has been a great – mainly laudable – push to remove some of the competiveness in early childhood learning and instill a great sense of self-esteem in our children. (Every child is the “Most Valuable Player.”) This is certainly a laudable goal but it seems we may at times be sacrificing some of the rigour which makes for success and initiative as seen in our decllining global leadership. An Asian-American mother, “the Tiger Woman”, has written a memoir in which she details the strict upbringing methods she used to raise her daughters in the old Chinese way (practicing the piano several hours a day, no play dates, not accepting homemade cards if they weren’t well done) and her partial success with it. She is being roundly criticized in the “Mommy Wars” and I agree with the crtiticism. But how do we raise kids with the ability to strive for success while still loving themselves?