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What I see is an offensive attitude (occasionally) from parents in situations where there is no danger (ie in public) and where being wary would suffice.
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I would agree with this, and go further to say when race is brought into the equation, going beyond "wary" has profound social consequences.
For example, "blacks" are currently the most segregated racial/ethnic group in the U.S. The main reason is that whites believe that crime rates are higher in neighborhoods where young black men live, so white families do not move into these neighborhoods.
And the crimes that whites are most afraid of are of course sex crimes: rape, sexual assault, pedophilia. However, the reality is that the proportion of blacks living in a neighborhood is an extremely poor predictor of the incidence of such crimes. Nevertheless, the
absolute best predictor of a white person's
subjective belief of a neighborhood's crime rate is the proportion of young black men in the neighborhood. It's a far better predictor than the
crime rate itself.
So, we have extreme segregation into white and black neighborhoods, regardless of income and educational levels. Even extremely liberal people who would be appalled at the suggestion that they are racist or sexist will not move into "black" neighborhoods because they have convinced themselves (wrongly) that such neighborhoods have higher crime rates because of the young black men living there.
Again, this is irrational behavior because the differences in crime rates
due to race alone are infinitesimal. As are the differences in crime rates due to gender alone. Since people seem to be more willing to justify anti-male discrimination based on crime rates than they are to justify racial discrimination based on crime rates, it would seem that willingness allows a back-door entry to racism: it's OK to discriminate against a black man as long as it's not because he's black, but rather because he's a man. But that's very convenient because the difference in crime rates between black/white are very similar to those between men/women, so the gender discrimination provides an excuse for all the usual kinds of racial discrimination and fear. When it comes to sex crimes, for most people the visceral part of the brain takes over and the logical part goes out the window.
Sometimes I think that 90% of the injustice in the world is due to fundamentally irrational fears . . . .