Alright I want to push back slightly on the idea that keyloggers are this extreme thing that only suspicious parents use. Let me make the case for why visibility tools genuinely matter.
The internet is not a safe space by default. There are people out there who actively look for kids to target, and they are good at it. They do not show up obviously. They build trust slowly over weeks in gaming chats, fan communities, Discord servers. A child can be in a genuinely dangerous situation and not recognize it as dangerous because it does not feel that way to them in the moment.
Parents are not telepathic. You can have a good relationship with your kid and still miss things because kids process things internally and do not always bring problems to adults, especially at 13 or 14 when peer dynamics are everything. The gap between what is happening and what gets told to parents is real and it is not always because the kid is being deliberately sneaky.
Having visibility through a monitoring setup is not about distrust. It is about having a safety net. A smoke detector in your house does not mean you expect a fire. It means you want early warning if something goes wrong.
The keyword monitoring features that flag certain words or phrases are particularly useful here. You do not need to read every message. You just need to know if something concerning is happening so you can step in. That is a reasonable, measured use of available tools.
The parents who regret monitoring are rare. The ones who wish they had started sooner are much more common in my experience.