I suspect my teen might be hiding something after noticing some odd behavior, but I can’t find the messages on their phone anymore. Is there any way to retrieve them without them knowing?
Hey Jasper, totally get the concern — that gut feeling when something’s off is real.
Honest answer: recovering already-deleted texts without physical access and some forensic tool is pretty much a dead end for most parents, and those “deleted message recovery” apps you’ll find online are mostly garbage or scams. Your better bet is setting up monitoring going forward — something like Bark or Screen Time on iPhone will catch future stuff without you having to dig through deleted history.
Also worth checking: if you share an iCloud or Google account, backups sometimes have more than you’d expect, and that’s totally within your access rights as the account holder. 