Short answer: if a Messenger message was deleted for everyone, you cannot pull it back out of Meta's servers — not with an app, not with a support request. What you can recover is anything that was copied somewhere else before the deletion.
Full disclosure: we build Ultimate Phone Spy, a parental-control app for exactly this — web history, app activity and screen time in one dashboard. Plans start at $16/month on the 12-month option, and the current plans are on our pricing page.
Where deleted Messenger content can still exist
- Archived chats. Open Messenger → your profile → Archived chats. Archiving hides a thread, it does not delete it, so an archived copy survives a later delete in some cases.
- Message requests and spam folder. Threads from non-friends sit there and are easy to miss.
- Your Meta data export. Facebook → Settings → Your information → Download your information, select Messages and request a download. The archive contains message history that was present when the export was generated; it is not a rollback, so it will not resurrect something deleted before the export date.
- A device backup taken before the deletion. An iCloud or Google backup from last week still contains last week's database. Restoring it onto a spare device is the only reliable way to read that older state — and restoring over the current phone will wipe newer data.
- Notification history. Android keeps a notification log, and some launchers surface it. It only holds the text that was pushed as a notification.
- On a device you administer, a parental-control tool that logs messages as they arrive will have a copy, because it captured the message before deletion. That is the one method that works prospectively rather than retrospectively.
What does not work
"Recovery" apps that ask for your Facebook password are credential phishing, full stop. Messenger conversations are end-to-end encrypted in secret chats, and normal chats are not exposed to third-party apps through any legitimate API — there is no endpoint a recovery tool could call even if it wanted to.
If the account belongs to your child and you are worried about what is being deleted, the practical move is a monitoring setup that logs going forward plus an honest conversation about why messages are disappearing.