I don’t usually write product reviews, but we have just started potty-training our second daughter and so this has been on my mind. And what is a blog for if not all the flotsam and jetsam that is on my mind?
I know a number of you are at this stage too, so here is what I have tried and considered. I hope it’s useful.
Safety First Potty ‘N Step Stool
$14.99
I hated this potty. The seat can be detached from the base so that you can place the seat on a standard toilet to help the child transition. The base can be turned over and used as a step stool.
There were two problems. Every time my daughter sat on it, the seat shifted or detached from the base, and it frightened her. When she became hysterical, I was not filled with warm regards for the Safety First company.
The second problem arises when you try to use the seat on a standard toilet. The seat is just too unwieldy. Unlike other child seats for standard toilets, this has a raised back and sides, requiring my daughter to position herself carefully. She did not like that. She would lean to keep from touching the back or sides, and then the seat would shift and she would fall.
This potty seat has been relegated to the land of no return: the basement. She still uses the stool, which has no handles and is difficult for her to move, which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the day.
BABYBJÖRN Little Potty – White
$9.99
I was tempted by this one because of the low price and the simplicity. It is all one piece with no corners, so it is very easy to clean. I decided against it because of the raised front to prevent little boy splashing. It makes it a little more difficult to sit in, and it was unnecessary for my girls, but if I were potty-training a boy, I would definitely have tried it.
Boon Potty Bench
$29.99
This potty looks swanky, and if you are still uncomfortable with the whole idea of a potty in any room but the bathroom, this is the one to get. Once the lid is closed, only the intiated know it is a potty.
As a stool, it can hold 300 lbs. It has side compartments for holding toilet paper or clean underpants. It is low enough that my small two-year-old has no trouble sitting on it by herself.
The seat is not detachable, so this one can’t transition to a standard toilet. The underside of the seat is reinforced with a plastic grid, which makes it stronger as a stool, but also requires more effort to clean after splashes. Compared to other potties, the opening on this one seems smaller, which may present difficulties.
Graco Soft Seat Potty Trainer 812K
$19.99
This is our favorite. It is easy for girls (but also has the detachable splash guard for boys), it has a removable seat that fits securely into both the potty and a standard toilet, and the padding on the seat is both easy to clean and a little less cold on her tushy.
My only complaint about this one is that the lid of the potty does not stay firmly up and tends to close on her if she leans back too far. It is light, so it doesn’t hurt her, but she definitely doesn’t like it.
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we never used a potty at all, just one of those seats that sits on top of the toilet and a stool. much easier to clean! plus we never had much room for a potty in our bathrooms and i couldn’t bear the thought of potty training in other rooms of the house and then convincing them to only use the potty in the bathroom. i bet with our 2nd he would rebel against a potty anyway, because he will want to do it just like his big brother! (he’s 2 now…any day now the fun begins…)
We didn’t really use a potty seat either. Here in Israel most families use a combination seat/step thing that fits on a regular toilet. It combines a kid-sized seat with a step-ladder so that they can hop on and off by themselves.
I bought the first one and decided shortly thereafter that I didn’t want a potty chair of any kind. I just couldn’t stomach emptying and cleaning it – I’d rather change a diaper. The other thing is that in our galley style bathroom, it was always in the way and I was always tripping over it. I decided we would hold off on potty training until he could get up on the toilet on his own – another the benefit of the “Whatever Dude” potty training program.
Like Antique Mommy, I found the idea of cleaning out a potty to be even more distasteful than changing a diaper. Luckily, because I have big boys to begin with who potty trained (relatively) late at 3 1/2, they were big enough to just use the toilet with no insert. By the way, I found those ‘splash guards’ for boys to be worse than useless. They got in the way, snapped off too easily, and were generally a nuisance.
Before I knew my boys’ butts were too big, we’d bought a Fisher Price potty that set off lights and sounds when the child tinkled in it. Can you imagine! We bought it because of its sturdiness and vowed to never buy batteries for it, but I still chuckle trying to imagine how badly the lights and sounds would have startled a haplessly unsuspecting toddler.
Thanks for writing this… it’s always a crap-shoot for new moms when it comes to what product to choose for something like this.
Hahaha, I said, “crap-shoot….”
We also only used one of the potty seats that fits on a standard toilet for our children. The clean up was so easy and there were no transitioning stages.
Tracy
I’m with the other ladies who never used a porta-potty. I found the one potty ring that had no nooks or crannies (Circo brand at Target.) Still, cleaning it off after every potty visit was annoying and gross. Thankfully my son watched his cousin scramble up on the regular toilet like a little monkey and learned to balance himself immediately!
Thanks for the reviews. We will be potty training sometime in the next year. I think I may do the potty ring on the regular toilet since Mr. Blue loves climbing onto things with a stool. However, it might be worth getting the Baby Bjorn for the “practice” sessions when he is in the stage of just getting used to sitting there.
Let me just say that none of the potty splash guards really work for boys. I’ve tried a bunch of them including the Baby Bjorn, but no luck. Plus I hate cleaning those things out. Grosses me out. It turns out the boys liked putting a smaller seat on top of the big potty and using that best. They felt like big boys.
Good luck with the potty training! Such fun.
The Baby has a potty which plays music, supposedly, when she pees in it. She quickly figured out that it would play music whenever she shot anything into it, so she just spent her days hurling mascara and crayons and toliet paper tubes into the potty. Until her daddy took the batteries out and now the Baby has a potty.
How funny. That last one is the one I used with my boys ten years ago. I guess the classics never die.
We never used the splash gaurd. They tended to injure themselves on it climing on and off. Nothing is worse than a pinched pee-pee.
We used the simple potty for the children.
The splash screen made the girls sit well on it.
No problem there.
The simple potty made it very attractive to want to go to the normal toilet.
I bought a potty for my son because he would always wait until he was about to wet his pants before he noticed that he had to go. And then he’d go tearing across the house yelling, “POTTY! POTTY! POTTY!” And often didn’t make it. So having a potty in the living room was a sound investment for us.
We really liked the bigger Baby Bjorn potty–the one you reviewed looked great online, but when I went to Babies R Us and saw it in person, it was really tiny. I suspect that one is more often used by people who do elimination training with babies.
[...] for its many cool features (like cushioned seat, easy to clean collection bowl, and removeable ring for use on toilet) and b/c Veronica at Toddled Dredge said good things about it in her potty review. [...]
We used the Potty Bench. I love the idea that it can be used as a seat for when we give her a bath, as well as a step stool for her when she washes her hands. She is a tiny 18mo old and can drag/push it to the sink easily.
I’ve tried both a potty and a toilet seat, and a I’ve found the toilet seat to be much more convenient and easy to clean.