The Association Between Parental Homework Checking and Chinese Adolescents’ Loneliness: The Mediating Role of Academic Pressure and the Moderating Role of Parental Educational Expectations

Driven by the Confucian cultural ideal of “wang zi cheng long”—the fervent hope that one’s child will rise like a dragon (i.e., achieve extraordinary success)—Chinese parents commonly engage in intensive academic involvement, such as frequent homework checking. However, the mechanisms through which this high-intensity monitoring affects adolescent mental health, and whether its effects are culturally specific, remain underexplored. Drawing upon the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) theory and the stress process model, this study used data from the 2022 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) on 1831 adolescents aged 9–15 to examine the impact of parental homework checking frequency on adolescent loneliness, the mediating role of academic pressure, and the moderating role of parental educational expectations. The results show that parental homework checking frequency was positively associated with academic pressure, which in turn was positively associated with loneliness. The mediating role of academic pressure was significant. Parental educational expectations significantly and negatively moderated the relationship between homework checking and academic pressure, and the moderated mediation was significant. Simple slope analysis indicated that the positive association between homework checking and academic pressure was stronger. In the Confucian cultural context that emphasizes academic achievement and filial responsibility, frequent parental homework checking is associated with adolescent loneliness through increased academic pressure. Unexpectedly, high parental expectations served as a buffer—a pattern that differs from typical findings in Western individualistic cultures, where high expectations often directly increase psychological distress. These findings suggest that interventions in Chinese family education should distinguish controlling from supportive monitoring and transform high expectations into emotional support and resource investment, thereby reducing adolescents’ academic pressure and loneliness.