How do parental support profiles moderate the relationship between growth mindset on mathematics achievement? Evidence from Chinese junior high school students

Abstract A growth mindset is an important psychological resource for students' academic performance. However, its benefits are not uniform and may vary with contextual conditions, among which parental support is particularly salient. Prior research has largely focused on single dimensions of parental support, leaving limited evidence on how combinations of emotional and content support jointly shape the relationship between growth mindset and academic performance. Using data from 617 seventh‐grade students in one region of China, we assessed students' growth mindset and mathematics achievement, as well as their perceived parental emotional and content support. Latent profile analysis identified four parental support profiles: high emotional‐low content (HE‐LC), high emotional‐high content (HE‐HC), low emotional‐high content (LE‐HC) and low emotional‐low content (LE‐LC). Students in profiles characterized by high emotional support showed higher mathematics achievement than those in low‐emotional profiles, and the HE‐HC profile also exhibited the highest levels of growth mindset. Moderation analyses further revealed a compensatory pattern: relative to the LE‐LC group, profiles with higher emotional support showed a weaker positive association between growth mindset and mathematics achievement. When students reported a low growth mindset, parental emotional support appeared to buffer against this psychological deficit and help sustain mathematics performance. These findings highlight parental emotional support as a potentially important family resource and suggest that emotional support may compensate for a lower growth mindset in relation to mathematics achievement.