With the fast expansion of the global economy, education has seen unparalleled growth around the world. Figure 1 depicts the trend of a constant rise in the proportion of students in all stages of education per 100,000 people in China from 2016 to 2020, which represents the flourishing development of education in China. However, as a result of the imbalance of educational resources, the increasing difficulty of entering a good college, and the sharp increase in employment pressure, education competition in China has intensified. Chinese parents are likewise becoming more eager to invest in their children’s education, and the resultant educational pressure is an important factor affecting parental mental health. From the perspective of the state and society, parental mental health has always been a hot topic because it plays an indispensable role in children’s education and growth. Therefore, studying the influence of the educational pressure behind family educational investment on parental mental health is of great practical importance. Existing research focuses on explicit investment behavior (e.g., economic investment) in family educational investment. However, implicit investment (e.g., psychological investment and time investment) receives considerably less attention in households. Moreover, although some studies have focused on the impact of family educational investment on children’s mental health and academic performance [1], they have rarely addressed the influence and mechanism of educational stress on parents’ mental health. This paper aims to further discuss and research these issues.

Education is a crucial endogenous mechanism of human capital accumulation, which is an essential reason why parents focus on education. Studies have shown that a well-educated person who attends an elite university has higher income and better career prospects [2], as well as an increased likelihood of accumulating social and academic capital [3]. In China, the Confucian cultural tradition of “Education changes destiny” has always attached great importance to children’s education, which directly determines how much parents invest in family education. Given the rise of increasingly equitable school education, the center of competition has gradually shifted from school education to shadow education (i.e., after-school tutoring) in order to maintain educational inequality among families of different classes [4]. Thus, shadow education has become an additional way for parents to improve their children’s academic skills, whose high cost and diverse choices bring more challenges to family educational investment and increase parental educational pressure.

Empirical studies show that social integration, social participation, and work intensity are all important factors affecting parents’ mental health [5–8]. Social integration and social participation reflect the social networks and social interaction between people. In comparison to social participation, social integration stresses subjective emotional integration and encompasses a broader range of activities. Individuals who have a high sense of social integration and social participation can easily obtain social support and then effectively recover their mental health [9–12]. As for work intensity, scholars are more interested in the topic of overwork. Studies have shown that overwork takes a toll on physical health and crowds out social participation [13, 14], leading to negative effects on mental health. Therefore, considering previous research on this topic, we suspect that the above three factors may play either a mediating or moderating role in the influence of parental educational stress on parental mental health.

The goal of this study is to investigate the impact of parental educational stress on their mental health, as well as the potential effect mechanisms. Given the scope of the available data, we divided family educational investment (i.e., parental education pressure) into three aspects: economy, emotion, and time. Research has found that all three aspects are negatively correlated with parental mental health. As an intermediary factor, social integration can significantly explain the negative effects of family educational investment on parental mental health. Furthermore, social participation significantly attenuates the negative effect of economic investment on parental mental health, while workload significantly amplifies the negative effect of emotional investment on parental mental health. The theoretical framework of this study is shown in Figure 2.

Parental mental health is essential for a happy family. However, in China, parents have been struggling with their children’s education for a long time, and little is known about how education affects their mental health. In this paper, we examined the effects of family educational investment on Chinese parents’ mental health from three perspectives, using data from CFPS2018 across 4,078 respondents sampled in China. Based on the personal perspective of the respondents in the sample, we conducted heterogeneity analysis and mechanism analysis.

In the basic regression model, we found that family educational investment was significantly and negatively correlated to parental mental health, indicating that parental educational pressure behind family educational investment is harmful to their mental health. This result is in line with literature discussing parental burnout and the motherhood dilemma [22–24]. Parents’ parenting style, peer effect, children’s cooperation, and other factors also influence parents’ perceptions of pressure. In China, “Tiger mother-style parenting” is a typical feature of family education [25]. To make children do well in school and life, parents using “Tiger mother-style parenting” need to be strictly self-disciplined [26, 27], which makes them bear heavy burdens. With the phenomenon of “education involution” in the form of private tutoring becoming increasingly significant, it inevitably intensifies the peer effect of educational competition, which is particularly evident on social networks where information is transparent. Making social comparisons on social networking sites has been linked to higher levels of depression [28]. Moreover, children in the rebellious stage tend to disobey their parents’ discipline, which undoubtedly intensifies the psychological burden on their parents. The continuous influence of these factors on parental education pressure gives rise to societal phenomena such as parental burnout and the motherhood dilemma, which seriously affect parents’ enthusiasm for parenting and personal career planning, and are not conducive to parental mental health.

In the heterogeneity analysis model, we found that parents in economically unbalanced areas faced greater pressure of economic investment but less pressure of psychological investment and time investment, while parents in economically balanced areas were the opposite. This indicates that there is a disparity between the rich and the poor in regions with uneven economic development, and parents with average income levels frequently pay more for their children’s education. In addition, parents who have higher education levels, economic investment and time investment have a greater impact on their mental health than emotional investment. One possible reason for this is that parents with higher education may make more after-school investments for their children and invest more in the tutoring process. Generally speaking, parents with higher education will enjoy more economic rewards. When they spend more time tutoring their children, they would lose more economic rewards for the same amount of tutoring time due to opportunity cost, which puts a heavy psychological burden on them.

Furthermore, in the mechanism model, we discovered that social integration can explain the detrimental effects of family educational investment on parental mental health, and social participation and workload can play a significant negative and positive moderating role respectively. This is consistent with existing studies [9–11], whose conclusions highlight the function of social networks as a link between social integration and mental health for individuals. Generally speaking, social networks (such as family and friends networks, neighbors networks, and social organizations) can affect a person’s mental health through social support, resource-sharing, and emotional attachment [29, 30]. The higher the level of social integration or social participation of individuals, the more developed the social networks are. This makes it easier for individuals to obtain social support, resources, and emotional attachment, thus strengthening their psychological defense line.

To the best of our knowledge, the present work contributes to the current literature mainly in three ways. Firstly, we used a large sample in our study. Secondly, we split family educational investment into three categories: economic investment, emotional investment, and time investment, which have not been covered in other literature. Thirdly, our conclusions have strong practical significance and can provide a reference for policymakers and practitioners.

There are two limitations that should be acknowledged when considering our results. Firstly, due to limited data availability, this paper did not conduct a comparative analysis of parental mental health between the local population and the floating population. However, in migrant cities, differences in the educational experiences of children from these two populations exist due to the hukou system (i.e., the household registration system) [31]. Secondly, due to limitations of the questionnaire survey, although we collected as many factors as possible reflecting psychological investment, the characterization of emotional investment was not comprehensive enough. These should be improved in future studies.

Even with these limitations, our findings offer novel evidence supporting the idea that many aspects of family educational investment can be detrimental to parents’ mental health. From a policy perspective, firstly, Chinese governmental agencies should promote and advance quality-focused education, and place emphasis on thorough assessment and multiple admissions. Additionally, the government should further improve basic security systems such as employment, healthcare, and social security, providing more protection for parents’ mental health. Secondly, schools should systematically improve school education quality, addressing inadequate and unbalanced distribution of high-quality educational resources. Communities should urge people to participate in grassroots governance and community collective activities, which widen parents’ social networks and provide more social support for them. Thirdly, individuals should actively participate in activities held by the community or other social organizations, gaining a broader sense of belonging, trust, and happiness, then reducing the psychological burden brought about by the pressure of their children’s education. The specific policy recommendation framework is shown in Figure 6.