How does parental involvement influence students’ wellbeing? A moderated mediated model

Parental involvement has been widely associated with adolescents' wellbeing, yet the psychological mechanisms underlying this association remain incompletely understood. Drawing on self-determination and family-school system perspectives, the present study examined the mediating role of psychological wellbeing and the moderating role of gender in the association between parental involvement and subjective wellbeing among Chinese adolescents. Participants were 450 junior middle school students recruited through stratified cluster random sampling. Structural equation modeling and conditional indirect effect analyses were used to test a moderated mediation framework. The results showed that parental involvement was positively associated with both psychological wellbeing and subjective wellbeing. Psychological wellbeing partially mediated the association between overall parental involvement and subjective wellbeing and fully mediated the effect of adolescents' attitudes toward parental involvement. Gender significantly moderated the strength of the indirect effect in the overall model, particularly for behavior-oriented forms of parental involvement, with stronger indirect associations observed among girls. In addition, several demographic characteristics, including grade level, parental marital status, co-residence status, and parental education, were associated with levels of parental involvement and wellbeing. These findings underscore the importance of adolescents' subjective interpretations of parental involvement and highlight gender as a boundary condition in the psychological processes linking family involvement to wellbeing. Although the findings are correlational, they contribute to a more differentiated understanding of parental involvement and adolescent wellbeing from a developmental perspective.