I’ve long been struck by this study [1], “Parents think - incorrectly - that teaching their children that the world is a bad place is good for them”.

To tl;dr a bit, this and other analyses tend to agree that whatever benefit you get from being too paranoid, distrusting, skeptical, etc in the name of safety is often overcome by the additional opportunities you get from being open, trusting, optimistic, and so on.

In other words, it is best to teach your children the world is a good and wonderful place; they can usually adjust their expectations accordingly later, but the reverse is less true, since it’s much harder to gain that sense of wonder and trust from nothing.

[1] https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/parentsprimalb...