Having had a ds who got regular infections up behind his foreskin from the age of 18 months, despite valiant attempts not to pull it back or go anywhere near it as advised, it irritates me intensely how much it is emphasised not to pull the foreskin back at all. Yes, at 6 months the foreskin may well still be fully attached and therefore not able to be pulled back, but the fact is, it does start detaching itself (retracting) after a while, and how will you know when if you never go near it? And if it has started retracting, then that means that infections can actually get up behind it and if you don't do something to relieve the colossal amount of swelling and smelly pus accumlulating behind said foreskin at that point (ie gently pull the foreskin back, bathe in lightly salted, sterile water and let the pus escape), your child will be in absolute agony and look like he's hung like a donkey.
Yes, of course it is silly and harmful to attempt to yank back a foreskin that is still fully attached to the penis, but once it has started pulling away, in my experience, not all penises are as self-cleaning as the "experts" claim. If they were, then why on earth are men advised to clean behind their foreskins? At what magical age is this sudden transformation into a foreskin that needs taking care of supposed to occur???? Following my experience with ds1 (who ended up having his foreskin fully released under general anaesthetic precisely so that I could pull it back fully to make sure it was clean and thus prevent the copious quantities of bacteria that were living in little pockets behind it from continuing to grow and cause doctors to confuse foreskin bacteria for urine infections, because every time he peed, colossal quantities of bacteria would be washed out into his urine), I totally ignored the advice not to touch a little boy's foreskin with ds2. And guess what: he's never had a problem. His foreskin is still not fully retracted (although most boys' are by the age of about 5), but it is largely retracted and I make absolutely certain that he always remembers to pull it back first thing when he gets in the bath, before there is any soap or other skin irritants in there, to ensure it looks clean and healthy. When he was younger, I used to do this for him and it caused him no pain whatsoever - why would it hurt to gently pull back an unattached piece of skin??? It just seems to me another bit of zealot-driven advice by people who think that all women are such idiots that they will tug their baby's foreskin back so hard that they will damage it, by attempting to unattach it before it is ready. So long as you don't pull your child's foreskin back further than it will readily go (and no, you can't easily pull too hard - you'd have to be really ham fisted to pull too hard accidentally), it's not going to do the child any harm. Nor is washing the penis behind the foreskin in plain water going to do any harm - use soap and you might irritate the skin and cause more problems; leave it alone and never pull the foreskin back as advised and you might end up with a child like my ds1 - and an adolescent/adult who doesn't realise that actually hygiene demands that you do clean behind your foreskin.