Streeter: She left her young kids home to go to work. Blame the cost of daycare.

The disturbing case of Aberdeen mother Kahliyah Gooding has been hard for me to forget.

The 23-year-old was charged in July with neglect of a minor and leaving kids under the age of 8 without adult supervision. Gooding’s two young children were found alone in what charging documents describe as hideously unsanitary conditions — bugs and feces were present in the apartment, and the children were unclothed except for full diapers.

It’s difficult to read and makes me terrified and furious on behalf of those helpless kids, but I also feel protective of Gooding who, given the age of her oldest child, has been a mother since she was 18. I am chilled and angered by the reason she gave when she was arrested: “She leaves her children at home because daycare is too expensive and she has to work,” the police wrote.

This case is not Gooding’s first, and I don’t know enough about the specifics to either cast complete judgment on her or defend her, though the conditions described are unsettling. The thing is that she’s far from the only parent who’s had to choose between work and childcare. In a country like ours that claims to promote and encourage family values, that’s indefensible.

According to childcare advocacy group First Five Years Fund, the price of childcare has gone up 25% in the last decade. Even if families can afford it, spots in licensed facilities are sparse.

“When someone announces they are expecting a baby, people say, ‘Are you saving for college already?’ but they should be asking, ‘Are you saving for childcare?’” said Laura Weeldreyer, executive director of the Maryland Family Network, which provides support and services to the state’s early-childhood community. “There’s a lot of demand and not enough supply.”

Remember when daycare providers during the COVID-19 shutdown closed immediately, leaving essential workers to choose between feeding their families and caring for them? Some of those providers never reopened.

“There is a popular saying that childcare is the workforce behind the workforce,” Weeldreyer said. “Childcare is the No. 1 reason that they [workers] call out or take sick days or leave the workforce altogether. They have to make the choice between the jobs they need and the families they love.”

I reached out to various entities involved in Gooding’s case, including her public defender in Harford County and the county’s police department, none of whom would comment on this story. So I don’t know what led her to this point, other than that she appears to be a single mother without anyone to watch her kids. And it’s easier to get to that point than you think.

I personally learned about the scarcity and expense of childcare when the baby who is now my son came to live with us as a foster child. We had a voucher to make daycare affordable. The trick was securing a place in the two weeks I had before returning to work, because I couldn’t officially start the search before we took physical custody. We found a facility at the last minute, but as a middle-class person, I probably could have worked from home if I had to until something opened. Most people don’t have that option.

It seems as though Gooding did not.

I don’t believe these issues are happening in a vacuum. One source of assistance, the federally funded Head Start early-education program for children from low-income families, is facing deregulation from the Trump administration. Another, Maryland’s Child Care Scholarship Program, has a partial temporary enrollment freeze, operating from a waitlist “because demand exceeds available funding,” according to the website.

The scholarship program, though, requires that all applicant parents, whether single or partnered, must work, be in an approved training program or attend school. That’s the chicken or the egg of it all.

“Parents shouldn’t have to jump through such difficult hoops to access programs designed to support them,” said Alexa Richardson, who has represented parents in such cases as a public defender and now works at the Washington, D.C.-based Civil Rights Corps.

But all we do to parents, especially poor ones, is construct hoops to put in their way that are sometimes flaming with a lion on the other side. It’s so hard to find affordable care that parents don’t always have the luxury of considering how good it is.

It also bears considering that fast-food jobs, like Gooding’s at a local rest stop, usually don’t provide set schedules, so parents wouldn’t be able to plan care more than a week ahead of time, if that. More flaming hoops.

Shanta Trivedi, an associate professor of law and faculty director of the Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff Center for Family, Children and the Courts at the University of Baltimore, used to represent parents facing cases like Gooding’s as a staff attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services’ Family Defense Practice. She has sympathy for people like her because of the realities of parenting while poor.

“So many cases look like neglect but are really poverty,” she said. She has seen case notes that mention unfolded laundry as a red flag. I’d fail that test. While we do not know everything about Gooding’s situation, Trivedi believes she was doing what she felt she had to do.

“This woman is so young. Most moms don’t want to leave their kids alone. I don’t think she left them because she thought it was a good idea,” Trivedi said. “She did what she had to do to put food in their mouths.”

It’s possible Gooding’s children are now in foster care, though we don’t know. “The state will pay for other people to care for your children, but the same money could be used for daycare so that they could stay with their mom,” Trivedi said. “We put a lot toward foster care and adoption but very little on prevention.”

We should be supporting parents before it reaches this point.

So why don’t parents in need avail themselves of the system? “Calling social services guarantees some sort of intervention, and you really run the risk of losing your kids anyway,” Trivedi said.

Ugh. What a desperate place to be in. Again, I have never been truly poor and became a parent at a well-established 42 years old. Even when I found myself a widowed single mother, I had a good job, stable place to live and family support.

In short, I had choices. It does not seem that Gooding had many. What an incredible tragedy that is.