friends for the first time, karla turns 18, the age when foster children emancipate or age out of the system. reporter: do you feel that you go out there and make your money and pay for your bills and take care of yourself? reporter: no, not yet. reporter: once you are emancipated, could you turn to your father for help? it has been really hard for me the fact that i never met my dad. when i was newborn, he just left me with my mom and he got remarried again. so he practically left my mom with nothing and nowhere to go, knowing that he had a daughter on the way. tomorrow, the hearing where karla is cut loose from the state. and the painful good-byes to her foster family as she moves on to the next phase of her life.
home is the only real bedroom karla has ever known. my mom, she started having mental problems, and that s whether everything just went bad. from the age of ten, she says, she and her mother lived in homeless shelters in orange county. i pretty much didn t get to be a kid. karla fell behind on her education too. at 16, when the state found out she wasn t in school, she was taken away from her mother and placed in foster care. reporter: has it been a good experience or bad experience? well, for me, it has been good. i have, you could say, a family. reporter: now just as karla says she is finally feeling like she is part of a family. the whole number is difficult visible by three. reporter: and beginning to catch up in school and making
literally have no one to turn to. in california, the help available has been scaled back. how do these young adults get by? here is thelma gutierrez with one teen s story in this a.m. original. this is my room. this is my bed. i have food. i have clothing. i have some place where i can call home. reporter: just imagine how frightening it would be to turn 18 and then to be turned loose out here without an education, money, apartment, or game plan for the future. that s what karla is up against as california cuts $80 million from child welfare services. we follow her emotional journey as she transitions out of the system. i m really stressed out these past few weeks and days have been just terrible. this bedroom in her foster