My point is we shouldn't be afraid to critically examine everything.
Who is saying otherwise? (This seems rather like a rhetorical technique Tooby and Cosmides accuse Stephen Jay Gould of using: "But I tell you the sun really does rise in the east".)
And we shouldn't be afraid of developing a child's critical thinking skills
Who, please, is saying that we should be afraid of developing a child's critical thinking skills, and in what context?
that idea that inflation creates the entire cosmic web in a trillionth of a picosecond
I've no problem with examining that critically, but I think this is an exercise best done by professional theoretical physicists, whose current position appears to me to be that it's probably right. (Though not that it's necessarily well described by the words you happened to use.) If you disagree with that, would you like to say what you consider stronger evidence against taking inflation seriously than the rough consensus of theoretical physicists is for taking it seriously?
(For clarity: I am not claiming, nor do I believe, that there is anything like unanimity among theoretical physicists that inflation is correct. Neither do I claim it's definitely correct. The usual position appears to me to be that it gives a description of the early universe that fits a lot of otherwise puzzling observations, but that in the absence of more direct evidence than we seem likely to get any time soon we can't upgrade it much beyond "plausible and a reasonable working hypothesis". Is that what you're objecting to, or are you objecting to some much stronger claim of certainty and if so who's making that claim?)
Related: The Santa deception Is Santa real On the care of young rationalists
All of the other takes on this topic start from a point, when a child (usually 5-9 years old) asks "Is Santa real?" Nobody yet asked "how to raise my child Santa-free?" What to say, when a two-year-old, who just noticed that there is this character on TV asks "will he come to me, too?" A toddler may not yet understand the concept of lie, of pretending, of things not physically existing. How to tell her, what will happen, what to expect, how and why other children behave differently?
My three-year-old daughter discovered Santa last spring, which finally forced me to think: how to deal with it? Ignoring the thing worked for three years, but what now? I live in an extremely catholic country (Poland), so I cannot be completely blunt about it.
In the end I decided to call it "the fairy-tale of [Santa] Claus." For me it has a lot of advantages: this is a story that can be told, retold, reinvented and everybody knows it. In addition, since the name includes the phrase "the fairy-tale", it has just as much validity as the tale of the Red Riding Hood or any TV character that she likes.
I tested some of her beliefs about "Miko". I opened the box with books intended for gifts in front of her. When she wanted to read some of them, I explained that she cannot yet read her book, because she'll get it on Christmas Eve. She asked "is it from Miko?" and I replied that in some way it is, but I bought it. She didn't insist on reading it right now. A few days ago she helped me wrap some of the gifts. She commented that action "Miko brought these so we can wrap them and give them as gifts from Miko."
Malcolm told me, that he likes best the strategy, when you say that Santa Claus is a game that everyone plays. People pretend that there's a big guy in a suit who does the thing, and if you ever let down the pretense to your friends, you lose the game. I'm not entirely convinced by this strategy - it may be too complicated for a 2- or 3-year old (since my daughter didn't wrap her mind around the information that I bought the books).
What are other strategies that you use? Or which ones you don't like? Why?