This paper considers the problem of simultaneous variable selection and estimation in a semiparametric mixed-effects model for longitudinal data with normal errors. We approximate the nonparametric function by regression spline and simultaneously estimate and select the variables under the optimization of the penalized objective function. Under some regularity conditions, the asymptotic behaviour of the resulting estimators is established in a high-dimensional framework where the number of parametric covariates increases as the sample size increases. For practical implementation, we use an EM algorithm to selects the significant variables and estimates the nonzero coefficient functions. Simulation studies are carried out to assess the performance of our proposed method, and a real data set is analyzed to illustrate the proposed procedure.