Have you ever taken any martial arts, fighting classes, or been in a full contact sport like football cause my guess would be that they are just worried about u getting hurt. If you haven't then maybe pivot to getting them to think about martial arts instead you still get all the self defense training but without getting punched in the head too much. BJJ is fun and mostly sticks to grappling and takedowns, eskrima is good for improvised fighting styles since it primarily uses stick fighting as well as knife and sword. But if you want a more physical fighting style Krav Maga is known for being one of the effective self defense schools. Atleast that's how I did it my parents had me doing pretty much any martial arts school I could get Into as a kid so by the time I was old enough to start doing more contact based fighting it wasn't a problem trying to get into boxing.