Abstract Background Under the background of moral education, students' mental health is increasingly valued. Traditional moral education often overlooks students' emotional needs, while research has shown that emotional support from teachers is crucial for students' development. However, how to systematically integrate emotional support strategies into moral education and verify their effectiveness still needs to be explored. The research aims to construct emotional support moral education strategies and empirically test their promoting effects on students' mental health and teacher-student relationships, providing a basis for a new moral education model that integrates mental health. Methods Adopting a quasi-experimental design. The research subjects are 405 students and their supporting teachers from two primary and secondary schools in a certain city with similar student sources. Among them, the experimental group includes 200 students and 10 teachers, while the control group includes 205 students and 10 teachers. The experimental group teachers received one semester of emotional support based moral education training, practicing core strategies: empathetic communication, positive encouragement, and creating a psychologically safe environment. The control group maintained the conventional moral education mode. The study used the "Mental Health Scale for Primary and Secondary School Students" and the "Teacher Student Relationship Questionnaire" as the main tools to measure all students twice before and after the experiment. The data was analyzed using SPSS 25.0 for statistical analysis. Results After intervention, data analysis showed that: (1) The post test scores of the experimental group students' mental health (M = 85.6) were significantly higher than those of the pre-test (M = 78.3), and the improvement was significantly greater than that of the control group (F = 15.34, p.001). (2) In terms of intimacy between teachers and students, the post test score of the experimental group (M = 4.1) was significantly higher than that of the control group (M = 3.4) (t = 4.87, p.01). (3) Behavioral observations showed that the experimental group teachers exhibited more frequent empathetic responses (2.8 times in the experimental group and 1.2 times in the control group) and higher constructive problem-solving rates (85% in the experimental group and 60% in the control group) in moral education contexts. The results indicate that emotional support strategies can effectively promote students' mental health and improve the quality of teacher-student interaction. Discussion Research has confirmed that embedding emotional support strategies into teachers' daily moral education work is a win-win path for promoting students' mental health and enhancing moral education effectiveness. This not only provides practical solutions for "psychological education," but also reshapes the role of teachers in the process of moral education. The effectiveness of emotional support lies in its practical fulfillment of students' needs for belonging and respect, the construction of a positive psychological buffering system, and thus enabling students to more actively internalize moral education norms. The main limitation of the study is that the intervention period is relatively short. Future research can extend the intervention time and further explore the differentiated responses of different student groups with different stages and traits to this strategy.
Shujuan Wang (Sun,) studied this question.