Teacher Discipline Intensity and Adolescents’ Mental Health Problems: A Moderated Moderation Effect Based on CEPS 2013–2014 Survey Data

Teacher discipline serves as a vital instructional and managerial tool for facilitating adolescent development and exerts profound influences on students’ physical and mental well-being. Grounded in expectancy violation theory, deservingness justice theory, and life history theory, the present study adopts data from the China Education Panel Survey (China Education Panel Survey, CEPS, 2013–2014) to explore the association between teacher disciplinary intensity and adolescents’ mental health problems and rigorously tests violation severity as the first-stage moderator and family migration status as the second-stage moderator within a moderated moderation framework. This study employs cross-sectional data from a nationally representative sample of 17,788 adolescents, and statistical analyses, including descriptive statistics, bivariate correlations, and moderation effect analyses, were conducted using SPSS 24.0 and the PROCESS macro. The empirical results demonstrate significant positive associations between teacher disciplinary intensity, student violation severity, and adolescent mental health difficulties. Family migration status is negatively correlated with perceptions of disciplinary appropriateness and the degree of student violation. Furthermore, violation severity negatively moderates the predictive relationship between discipline intensity and mental health problems. Although intensified teacher discipline significantly predicts higher levels of adolescent mental health problems across both high- and low-violation contexts, such adverse effects are substantially weakened when student violations are severe. Critically, the interactive pattern between discipline intensity and violation severity is more salient for migrant adolescents than for their non-migrant peers. These findings offer a clear theoretical explanation for why reasonable and equitable school discipline can protect and promote adolescents’ mental health.