Donna Cill, the assistant dean of student affairs at Rutgers School of Nursing, pictured with her two daughters.

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Donna Cill, the assistant dean of student affairs at Rutgers School of Nursing, pictured with her two daughters, recruits and mentors students while directing the school’s continuing education programs. Two questions are not far from the mind of Cill: “Why do adolescents engage in health-risk behaviors?” and “Why did I do what I did?”

Photography: 
courtesy of Donna Cill

For many years Donna Cill dealt with the repercussions of her early pregnancy, including having to drop out of college as a first-year student to support her newborn and herself. Nonetheless, she managed to earn an L.P.N. to qualify her for nursing jobs and then completed bachelor’s, master’s, and doctor of nursing practice degrees while working and raising her daughter, Alleea.

Today, as the assistant dean of student affairs at Rutgers School of Nursing, Cill SNC’08 recruits and mentors students while directing the school’s continuing education programs. Two questions are not far from her mind: “Why do adolescents engage in health-risk behaviors?” and “Why did I do what I did?” 

Cill points out that some teens have “what is called a ‘limited time perspective,’” she says, “a total focus on the present and an inability to envision future events and consequences. This is what happened to me.” 

Her current research project, “Empowering Daughters and Mothers Through Social Media,” funded by the Jewish Women’s Foundation of New Jersey, is finding ways for mothers to communicate better with their daughters. Research shows that good communication between a child and at least one parent reduces every adolescent health-risk behavior identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; for a girl, that parent is usually her mother. “Mothers can help daughters properly envision their futures,” she says.

Cill is recruiting seven teenage girls from a Newark middle school and their mothers to participate in three focus groups—one with the teens, one with the mothers, and one with mothers and daughters. Cill wants to find what mothers and daughters battle about and what leads to a break-down in communication. She’ll produce video vignettes of “what to do and what not to do” to post on YouTube. Her new blog, Mother Daughter Connect (motherdaughterconnect.com) provides health-risk assessment tools and invites visitors to converse about the best ways for mothers and daughters to speak to each other.

Conflict is a natural part of the mother-daughter dynamic, and Cill is drawing from lessons learned with her daughters, Alleea, now studying for a master’s in journalism at Columbia University, and Kennedy, 9. “My research is examining mother-daughter dynamics throughout the life span in order to help them to successfully navigate life’s critical junctures together.”