On Aesop:

... like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, he made use of humble incidents to teach great truths, and after serving up a story he adds to it the advice to do a thing or not to do it. Then, too, he was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable; but he by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events.

[Apollonius of Tyana, 1st century AD]

So, Aesop could do it, and I could do it with my kids. Use a story to illustrate a truth, but being abundantly clear that the story was a story, just that, not something that actually happened. I ask again: Christianity, wassup with you? Why are you so scared of telling children the truth? Don't you believe that they can take it? Isn't it a damn sight harder for them to swallow your myths and then, untold, have to try to sort out myth from reality themselves? Why do you put such a burden on your children? You have absolutely no reason to lie to your children, so the only conclusion is that you are indulging in child abuse in the cause of keeping up the numbers. Here's your truth: there may have been no Jesus. There is no contemporary Roman record of Jesus, which is too amazing to be true (except that it is). The Romans wrote so much down about everything, avidly. But no mention of a Jesus. The only mentions are by his followers. Yet it was the Romans whose noses he supposedly got up. Have you told your kids this?
Or have you just stuck to water to wine, Lazarus up from the dead, crucified then back to life? Really, how honest are you with your kids? Have you told them how much the much-vaunted four gospels disagree with each other? Have you told them about all the other suppressed gospels? Why won't you be straight with your kids? Do you really think that they won't be able to see reality unless it's presented as myth?