Minors

At TLC Tugger, we say if you’re old enough to have your genitals cut then you’re old enough to get help setting things right. We’re glad you found us.

Please protect your child during hospital stays and doctor visits with our Infant Ankle Bands. If you’re concerned that Dad is not eager to leave the child intact, we suggest Dad wear our simple tapeless Your-Skin Cone to keep his surviving skin over the glans for a few weeks. He’ll see just how supple and sensitive the protection of the foreskin makes the glans, and this will make forced genital cutting for the child unthinkable. Any guy who is not willing to do this painless experiment to inform a decision that will affect his son’s sexual experience for life is not fit to be a parent (and you can tell him we said so).

Even if your son makes it home from labor and delivery intact, you still need to be wary about ill-informed medical practitioners and caregivers attempting to prematurely forcibly retract your son’s foreskin. This is not recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics. ONLY THE OWNER should ever retract a foreskin. If he’s not old enough to do it then it doesn’t need to be done. The foreskin will gradually become retractable during childhood from the boy’s own curious manipulations. Caregiver Foreskin Retraction is malpractice, it injures the delicate glans, and it is the main reason intact boys wind up actually needing interventions including circumcision. Since a child’s foreskin is normally and naturally tight and adhered to the glans, a diagnosis of phimosis in a child is medical fraud.

Sorry that circumcision has affected your family. Many parents are eager to make amends and do something positive for the circumcised baby now before the cumulative damage to the exposed glans gets any worse. We can make our Your-Skin Cone passive tapeless skin retainer in any size. Helping a baby this way is uncharted territory. I have only one mom who reported success with cones for a son in diapers. Her last report was after 9 months using them. One thing is certain; NOT having a foreskin has known drawbacks.

If you decide to help him wear a cone, you’ll need to be very attentive to possible irritations. Perhaps start with 20 minutes of wear and then observe for a while. Keep doubling the duration until he’s wearing it pretty much always. It’s hard to envision anything bad happening, as we’re only helping the skin to act as it is evolved to act.

So what you need to do is supply us his flaccid glans width so we can make you some cones. Keep them clean in a little Tupperware type container and keep the worn ones in a separate container until you can run them through the dishwasher.

One important consideration is how to educate caregivers. Daycare providers in cutting cultures may decide you’re weird. You have nothing to be embarrassed about for doing what’s best for your son. If you don’t think you can trust caregivers to correctly apply a clean cone with each diaper change, maybe you should wait and re-evaluate things when your son is out of diapers. In the home Dad’s penis is probably available for you to practice on, but we don’t yet have a training tool for other caregivers. There is just nothing like the real thing.

The sooner he can manage application himself the better, because caregivers handling his penis to apply these cones will sometimes cause erections. It would be best to practice on Dad before trying to fit your son, but if you’re not Dad, Dad is not available, or he’s unwilling, then you’ll just have to go for it after viewing our Your-Skin Cone Instructions.

We can help with the words for what you’ll tell your son (especially if he has an intact younger brother). IF and only IF the cut child says “why am I not like my brother” THEN you can explain: “Doctors are able to do miraculous things for sick people because they are always learning new things. Back when Daddy was born some doctors thought it was best to take some skin off the penis, but now they have learned it’s better to have the natural amount of skin. Wearing these cones helps your skin and Daddy’s skin get back to normal, like your little brother’s.”

The boy can also be invited to tug on his skin while waking, while falling asleep, and with every trip to the toilet (perhaps when he has privacy vs at a care center where the bathroom doors might remain open). One woman whom Jody McLaughlin (editor of Compleat Mother) knows found that her son’s skin would stay briefly over the glans after just a few months of this manual tugging: “Look Mom, it covers.” (The boy had asked what he could do to look like his intact baby brother).

When a boy is close to 10 years old he might be ready to try wearing a tugging device in bed or around the house while continuing to wear the retaining cone during all other hours. We have a dad and twin sons restoring at our online User Group and the kids started at age 12. We sent some Tuggers to two 7 year-old cousins (sons of French sisters who did the actual buying) years ago, but they never reported back on their success.

You know your son’s maturity and self-confidence level. When wearing a Tugger, every user needs to be emotionally prepared to explain himself since a wardrobe malfunction can occur at any time. We have ways to prevent unveilings but a restorer has nothing to be embarrassed about. The simple truth – that the device is worn to heal an unwanted injury to the penis – is generally sufficient. Most people wish to be seen as compassionate. People say that nothing is meaner than a group of school kids, but that is really changing with strong anti-bullying campaigns.

And if your intact child is ever told by peers: “Your penis is funny looking,” you can hope he would let you know. Tell him the simple answer is: “It does not look funny, it’s normal. Stop staring at my penis, weirdo.” I guess my counsel to the intact child would include something about being kind to the cut boys. They didn’t have a choice, so it’s certainly nothing to make fun of them about. Their family probably didn’t know that circumcision wrecks sex.

First, we urge you to be open about restoring with the people you care about. They love you and want you to be happy. The only person with anything to be embarrassed about is the one cutting children’s genitals. Tell as many people in your life as you dare.

Being closeted about anything makes one lonely and boring. Like at a party, someone will say “What’s new?” And you’ll reply: “Nothing. And you?”

What’s really new is you have this restoration project you’re passionate about, and you’re really healing yourself, and maybe this morning it was cold and you looked down and you saw your own skin over your glans (for a few fleeting seconds) for the first time in your life, and you sat there and you wept.

Wept.

Nothing new? Sharing your passions and triumphs IS living. Don’t wait to start living.

If you want to discuss your situation with a doctor, be assured he or she will keep your conversation private if you ask. However, the doctor may not know any more about foreskin than you would learn in 20 minutes by watching the video “Functions of the Foreskin” on YouTube, and may never have heard of non-surgical foreskin restoration.

Pay however it’s convenient. Without a credit card choose “Pay by Check” at checkout. The best course is probably mailing a postal money order; they’re cheap, get them at the post office or Wal-Mart. They’re easily replaced if lost in the mail. Note that if you pay with a friend’s or a relative’s PayPal account or email address, they will get our confirmation email showing what you ordered AND YOUR MEASUREMENTS (if you supplied those via our drop-down list).

We send discreet white pouches by 1st class mail (about 4 days) or international Airmail (about 8-10 days) from USPS.com unless other arrangements have been made. With these there is no signature required for delivery. International parcels require a customs form with a vague description.

At TLC Tugger we’re good people, but a bad person would say the same thing. If you’re under 18, you should NEVER give your real contact info to anyone on the internet, so we would urge you to have something delivered care of a trusted friend, cousin, neighbor, uncle, coach, scoutmaster, pastor, boss, etc. We’re not going to ask about it; we’ll send it to whatever address you supply, but if it’s not yours, it works best to have your name first, then “c/o Joe Blow” where Joe Blow is the guy who actually lives there. And be careful; dealing with some of the people mentioned can be as risky as cavorting online.

In the US, Canada, and maybe some other places we can also send a parcel to the Post Office where it would be held for you to pick up.

For sizing, what you do is supply your glans width (flaccid and erect, measured at the widest point with a straight ruler from side to side) and then we can advise you on how we would size your gear.

For folks younger than 18 years we don’t recommend the strapless modes of the TLC-X because those push on the glans. It’s hard to imagine what could go wrong because the pushed surface is much greater than the cross-sectional area of the skin tube we’re trying to expand, but you’re still growing, and who knows. But you COULD use the TLC-X in pulling mode only (with straps or weights) for now. The TLC-X really gives the most versatile ways to hang weights if that’s your interest.

The classic TLC Tugger with the day and night straps can be used by anyone with sufficient starting slack. A good routine might be to tug around the house and in bed, and to wear the Your-Skin Cone by itself all other hours.

Now ONLY YOU can decide if tugging while asleep is safe in your situation. You’ll need to test by applying the device, getting erect, and carefully flopping around on the bed to see if you can live with the risk of whatever you feel the worst case scenario is. One bad thing that could theoretically happen is that somehow your erection is forced to fold or point in a direction it doesn’t want to, which could lead to a rupture of the corpus cavernosa. I’ve NEVER heard of this happening to a tugger, but Google fractured penis to learn about the anatomical reasons it could happen. Also Google Ischemia. If you decide to tug in bed, set an alarm every two hours the first few nights so you can flip on the lights and check on things. Never tolerate pain.

We’re here to help.