Anxious parents and weary children: Longitudinal association between parental educational anxiety, academic self-efficacy and learning weariness in Chinese early adolescents

Parental educational anxiety, a phenomenon stemming from the highly competitive landscape of Chinese education, has been linked to adolescents’ learning weariness, which describes students’ overall negative reactions to academic pursuits and may be influenced by such anxiety. While prior research has predominantly explored the one-way impact of parental factors on adolescent academic development, the reciprocal dynamics between these elements have received less attention. To address this gap, the current study developed three competing models to investigate the relationships among educational anxiety, academic self-efficacy, and learning weariness. The study involved 266 early adolescents (44.4% female; M age = 11.96 years, SD = 0.83) and one of their parents (78.9% mothers; M age = 38.97 years, SD = 4.74), who participated in two rounds of surveys conducted one year apart. The findings from the half-longitudinal mediation analysis indicated that (1) no direct unidirectional or bidirectional association between educational anxiety and learning weariness was detected, and (2) in the retained parent-effect model, educational anxiety was prospectively associated with learning weariness via academic self-efficacy, although this indirect association was small and statistically fragile across model specifications. The reverse pathways were not statistically detected in the current sample, but low statistical power precluded definitive conclusions about directionality. These results suggest that the parent-effect model provides the most parsimonious account of a fragile but consistently positive indirect association from parental educational anxiety to adolescents’ learning weariness via academic self-efficacy, and offer empirical insights to inform future research and intervention development aimed at alleviating learning weariness and enhancing the quality of family education.