The story of Eden is a good allegory for childhood. We grow as children in a garden of love and care, a garden at its best so rich and stable that, as children, we don’t even recognize the work and thought that lie behind it. As adolescents we enter both the world of knowledge and responsibility and the world of labor and pain, including the literal and metaphorical labor pains of bringing another generation of children into the world. Our lives wouldn’t be fully human without both phases—Eden and the Fall, innocence and experience.
