The house, in many ways, seems too big for two.

Set in the new Pembrook Farms subdivision near Atlanta, the 3,000-square-foot two-story with the stone entrance has several empty rooms and, in places, bedsheets for drapes. Katrina Lawson, its new owner, isn't sure what to do with at least two rooms. Maybe a computer room for her daughter? "I don't know," she says.

For Ms. Lawson, there's a certain irony in her newfound status as homeowner. A former foster child who bounced from home to home, she is delighted finally, at age 24, to sink her roots into one place. She recently became one of the first in the nation to complete a new program aimed at helping foster kids who've "aged out" of state custody buy homes and other "major life assets" such as cars.

But Lawson, now a Fulton County sheriff's deputy, is also finding that her roomy new quarters require a mental adjustment. The $200,000 house is so spacious that it sometimes feels lonely, not unlike the childhood she still struggles to put behind her.

The program, funded primarily by the Jim Casey Foundation, is part of a movement to better address the needs of foster children as they exit state care, usually at age 18.

"Kids are struggling in our systems, and there is an obligation that [states and social service organizations] are increasingly meeting that it's no longer OK to say, 'Bye, have a good life,'" says Sue Christie, deputy executive director at the American Public Human Services Association in Washington. States "have gone to town to really stabilize these kids" after they age out of foster cares.

Driving the concern about the post- foster-care experience are statistics showing that states, acting in their role as "parent" to children found to be neglected or abused, are often not doing much better at child-rearing than the biological families.

In California, one-third of foster-care "graduates" become homeless within a year of leaving state custody, fewer than 10 percent enroll in college (despite a federal $5,000 stipend available to high school grads or GED holders) and only 1 percent graduate, and about one-fourth end up in jail within two years, according to the National Center for Youth Law. A University of Chicago study published last year found only 46 percent of former foster kids nationwide have a bank account.

"Most 18-year-olds in this country have not left home, but somehow we decide that foster youths should be different," says Mark Courtney, director of the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago, which conducted the study. "That 'independent living services' programs alone are going to make foster kids, of all people, successful at being on their own is a cruel hoax."

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