Parental Educational Expectations, Academic Pressure, and Adolescent Mental Health: An Empirical Study Based on CEPS Survey Data

Background: This study aimed to investigate the relationship between parental educational expectations and adolescent mental health problems, with academic pressure as a moderating variable. Methods: This study was based on the baseline data of the China Education Panel Survey, which was collected within one school year during 2013–2014. It included 19,958 samples from seventh and ninth graders, who ranged from 11 to 18 years old. After removing missing values and conducting relevant data processing, the effective sample size for analysis was 16344. The OLS (Ordinary Least Squares) multiple linear regression analysis was used to examine the relationship between parental educational expectations, academic pressure, and adolescents’ mental health problems. In addition, we established an interaction term between parents’ educational expectations and academic pressure to investigate the moderating effect of academic stress. Results: The study found that adolescents whose parents had high educational expectations reported less mental health problems. (β = −0.195; p < 0.001). Additionally, adolescents who had high academic pressure reported more mental health problems. (β = 0.649; p < 0.001). Furthermore, the study found that academic pressure had a significant moderating effect on the relationship between parental educational expectations and adolescents’ mental health problems (β = 0.082; p < 0.001). Conclusion: Parental educational expectations had a close relationship with adolescents’ mental health problems, and academic pressure moderated this relationship. For those adolescents with high levels of academic pressure, the association between high parental educational expectations and mental health problems became stronger. On the contrary, for those adolescents with low levels of academic pressure, the association between high parental educational expectations and mental health problems became weaker. These findings shed new light on how parental educational expectations affected adolescent mental health problems and had significant implications for their healthy development.