ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Health Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1582493
The Impact of Secondar y School Students' Per ceptions of Par ental Academic Involvement and Academic Str ess on Inter nalizing Pr oblem Behavior s: The Mediating Roles of Psychological Resilience and Mater ialism
Provisionally accepted
- Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
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This study aimed to examine how perceived parental academic involvement and stress influence internalizing problem behaviors (i.e., depression and anxiety symptoms) among secondary school students in international schools, focusing on the mediating roles of psychological resilience and materialistic values. A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 412 secondary school students (Mage = 16.28 years; 50.2% female) from international schools in Mainland China. Participants completed validated questionnaires assessing perceived parental academic involvement and stress, psychological resilience (CD-RISC-10), materialism (MVS), depression (PHQ-9), and anxiety (GAD-7). Hayes' PROCESS macro 4.0 (Model 4) with bootstrapping (5,000 samples, 95% CI) was used to examine the parallel mediation effects. This population was selected due to the unique cultural and academic stressors faced by international school students, such as cross-cultural adjustment and elevated academic demands. Perceived parental academic involvement negatively predicted internalizing problem behaviors, while perceived parental academic stress was positively associated with them. Psychological resilience and materialism both significantly mediated the relationship between parental academic stress and internalizing symptoms. However, only psychological resilience—not materialism—mediated the effect of parental academic involvement. Moreover, perceived parental involvement did not significantly predict adolescent materialism. The findings suggest that fostering psychological resilience and addressing materialistic values may help buffer the negative impact of academic stress on adolescents' mental health. While the results provide valuable insights into the emotional adjustment of international school students, caution is advised in generalizing the findings to other student populations.
Keywords: perceived parental academic involvement, perceived parental academic stress, Internalizing problem behaviors, international school middle school students, resilience, materialism
Received: 24 Feb 2025; Accepted: 12 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Xue. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Li Xue, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
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