I think it's more destructive to control and remove your child from the possibility of risk at the cost of preventing them from learning to navigate the world with the information at hand to do so in way they can manage.
There is something to be said about the socialization of sports. But there is such a thing as negative socialization, regression even. I would say football consistently has one of the most toxic cultures of any sport. It’s improving, very slowly. But there’s more to gain than just lower head injury risk by switching to a different sport.
I played football and yet never drink, have never done drugs, am not and was never homophobic, never got into trouble etc.
Would I let a kid play football now, with all the knowledge of CTE? No. I absolutely even worry about it for myself. But it's a bit odd, to me, to say "football made me a bad person".
I think basically all people who were socialized male have had these experiences at one point or another, whether it be in football, in class, in the military, at sleepovers, in the locker room.
My point is more so that football has a particular “culture”, or it did when I was a kid. And that culture was not necessarily socially productive at a young and impressionable age. When we see certain behaviors in particularly young men, we have to wonder where they come from, and what we are doing to cultivate that.
Encouraging them to get a drivers license is fine (run cross-country), but getting them a driver's license and buying your 16-year old a sports car with bald tires and no seatbelts (football) is negligent.
If cars, alcohol or weed caused 75%+ of the people who used them to have massive brain damage then it'd be unreasonable to allow people to use those too.