This discussion draft of a conceptual framework for monitoring children's services was prepared by Peat, Marwick and Co. for the Children's Services Monitoring Transfer Consortium (CFMCS), an organization spanning five states: California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas, and West Virginia. The primary purpose of this conceptual framework was to define the scope of activities appropriate to the consortium. Following the first section's brief introductory overview of CFMCS's purpose, section two briefly discusses the social services environment in which monitoring takes place in terms of state differences in scope of approach, terminology used, and organization of monitoring and related activities. The third section sets forth a definition of monitoring as a management control process. The definition clarifies what is included in monitoring, sets boundaries to exclude certain activities, and suggests looking at monitoring as a process that seeks to increase both program quality and management efficiency on an ongoing basis. A general monitoring classification framework, reflecting what is happening in day care monitoring in the five consortium states, is presented in section four. The final section discusses issues related to the extension of the monitoring concepts to other children's services. (Author/MP)