How Does Parental Mediation Impact Children’s Academic Performance Within the Family System? Evidence from a Nationwide Survey in China

With the accelerating pace of societal digitalization, parental mediation practices have emerged as a critical mechanism for facilitating children’s socialization within the family system. Based on the 2022 Chinese Minors’ Digital Life and Online Protection Survey dataset, this study empirically examined the current state of parental mediation and its influencing mechanism on school-aged children’s academic performance. The results indicated that the level of parental mediation demonstrated a significantly positive influence on students’ academic performance. This finding remained robust when subjected to rigorous validation methods, including instrumental variable analysis, propensity score matching, and double machine learning techniques. Meanwhile, the mediation models showed that children’s e-learning behavior and civic engagement played parallel mediating roles in the relationship between parental mediation and academic performance. Moreover, heterogeneity analysis further revealed that family socioeconomic status negatively moderated the indirect pathways through which parental mediation influenced students’ academic performance. Our research suggested that active parental mediation could not only be beneficial for children’s academic performance but also be helpful to narrowing developmental inequalities across different social classes.