The mental health of students is an important issue in today’s society. Compared with elementary and middle school students, high school students have more complex and intense emotional experience. Heavy study tasks, intense peer competition, and parents' high expectations put high school students under great pressure. High school students have a high sense of alienation from society, environment and interpersonal relationships, and experience more negative emotions such as helplessness, loneliness, depression and anxiety that are not conductive to their healthy growth. According to Bronfenbrenner's ecosystem theory, family is an important micro-environment in teenagers’ life. Warm and democratic family environments help promote students’ mental health. Parental involvement plays an important role in shaping adolescents’ personality and emotional development. Thus, in the present study, our primary purpose was to examine the influence and potential mechanism of parents’ academic involvement on high school students’ negative emotions. In this study, participants were 1569 students in grade 10 and grade 11 (634 boys; Mage = 15.36 and 16.35 years, respectively) from three public and regular high school that located in Shanghai, China. Data were collected using student-reports of parents’ academic involvement, psychological control, quality of parent-child relationship, and negative emotions. Every participated student had an account and password to log into online assessment system and completed a series of measures. The statistical analyses in this study consisted of two steps. First, we conducted a preliminary analysis calculating descriptive statistics (means, SDs and correlations) for all study variables. Second, we examine the moderated mediation model between parental academic involvement and students’ negative emotions after controlling for gender and grade using Mplus 7.4. The results showed that: (1) parental academic involvement was positively associated with psychological control and quality of parent-child relationship, and negatively associated with students’ negative emotions; (2) quality of parent-child relationship had a mediating effect between parental academic involvement and negative emotions. The indirect effect of parental academic involvement on negative emotions through increasing quality of parent-child relationship is -.09 (95% CI [-.12, -.07], SE = .01, t = -.653, p < .001); (3) parental psychological control moderated the relation between parental academic involvement and quality of parent-child relationship. Parental academic involvement was both significantly associated with quality of parent-child relationship for students with high and low parental psychological control (B ＝ .47，B ＝ .39，ps < .001); (4) the relation between parental academic involvement and negative emotions was moderated by parental psychological control. Parental academic involvement was negatively associated with negative emotions for children with low parental psychological control (B ＝ -.13，p < .001), but not significant for children with high parental psychological control (B ＝ -.04，p > .05). This study contributes to deepen the understanding of the mediated moderating effects of parents’ academic involvement and students’ negative emotions among Chinese high school students. The present findings underscored the importance of parental academic involvement in decreasing students’ negative emotions through heightened quality of parent-child relationship, and also have implications for parents and educators to decrease parental psychological control during parents’ involvement in high school students’ learning. We suggest that parents should pay more positive attention to high school students, show more interest in their academic life, and communicate with them more friendly and listen to their ideas, which will help reduce students’ bad mood and improve their mental health.