Originally Posted by SirConcis

You need to take the "anti-circ" stuff with a grain of salt. Some of their "do not touch" recommendations were in response to pro-circ arguments that it was simpler for parents to care for circumcised babies, so the anti-circ just countered that you shouldn't try to retract the skin at all , ever, making it simpler to care for the ucnut penis than for a cut one.

The answer lies in the middle.

You must NEVER try to forcibly retract the foreskin.
But you can gently try to pull it back at regular intervals to monitor its progress. GENTLY is the word here. Once you feel it no longer easily/freely moves back, you stop there. In time, you will notice more and more of the glans that can easily be exposed. Always bring the skin back over the full head afterwards.

Once the foreksin does become partially retractable, you probably wnat to rinse under it in the bath. (retract foreksin as far as it can easily go and just wipe the gunk out gently with water (no soap).

as long as the foreskin is fully adhered to the glans (and thus fully unretractable), gunk won't accumulate between foreksin and glans, so infections won't happen much. But as the foreskin starts to separate, the process of keratinisation of glans/foreksin begins and both layers start to shed dead skin cells, and urine will become ttrapped under foreksin.

The process of the ofreksin separating from glans and becoming loose enough to retract varies from child to child. Hence some people outside the USA recommending common sense verification of the progress of the foreksin's retractibility.

Keyword here is to check for foreksin retractibility, NOT to make foreksin retract.