Customer Reviews

Sesame Street Potty Soft Seat, Elmo

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

We bought this because my son loves Elmo. Unfortunately, he now refuses to sit on it because it slips around on our elongated toilet seat. It is completely unstable. He won't admit it, but he's afraid of it. So, now he won't go on the big potty and is back to his Baby Bjorn potty chair. I'm going to buy something else.

We had a seat SORT OF like this when my son was training - and lost it. Not sure if it was the same manufacturer or not. It had no handles then, and the pee guard stood up high and was removable. We never used the pee guard, it made it harder to get on the seat and it just wasn't needed - we just taught my son to point it down.

Now I am training twin girls and thinking Elmo might get one of them on the potty more (one shows way more interest than the other - it's the reluctant one I want to bribe) We have little potties with inserts that come off but most parents know the power of Elmo - I'm willing to try anything at this point, within reason. (ie the all-out free standing elmo potty is too much, LOL, and I want to take advantage of the fact that both are willing to use the big potty with an insert)

The reviews about the pee guard on this were so puzzling I had to see it in person before buying it - and it looks TERRIBLE. It's a very low pee guard. Basically too low to serve any purpose for a boy, but it's there, and it's high enough that boy or girl I can see them peeing on it and making more of a mess than if it wasn't there. (One of my girls likes to look down and kind of shift her stuff forward as she pees - not normally a problem, but with this in the way, it would be) And it does not come off. I actually stood there in the store contemplating if we could cut it out somehow, maybe with a dremmel, but you shouldn't have to make modifications to a potty ring. It's one of the worst designs I can imagine. It's like I can kind of see what they were thinking but they should have thought harder. So I decided to skip this. Even if we were to have marginal success with it, I am pregnant with another boy now, and I refuse to buy something I know he won't be able to use.

I am really kicking myself for not replacing my son's potty ring when we lost it, but he was doing well enough without it and I never saw it becoming a hard to find item. No handles made it easier to travel with. We kept it in our diaper bag. Now I am in the market for a used potty ring!

The lid that is intended to keep the urine inside does nothing, it actually makes it worse. This makes it very difficult to use, my son feels so uncomfortable that he tries to get further back and retains his urine not to splash, how good is this???....

There are a number of potty seats listed on Amazon with identical construction but different designs. You'll find that the ones with designs more geared toward girls (Dora, etc...) have slightly higher ratings than the ones geared toward boys (Thomas the Tank Engine, etc...). There is a definite reason for this: the design is no good for boys. The pee-pee guard in front isn't high enough to provide any containment at all. It probably wouldn't be appropriate to provide pictures, but you get the idea.
But the ratings for all of them are pretty low, probably because the seat isn't very stable, especially, as another reviewer mentioned, if you have even a slightly elongated toilet seat. This seat slides back and forth a lot.

After the clip-on seat that came with my daughter's training potty became an apparent failure, we decided to give this a try. The first thing I noticed is that it slides around on the toilet seat, I was very disappointed with that and almost took it back. My daughter surprised me by grabbing the handles and sliding her little buns on it perfectly though.

Aside from the fact that it's not a snug fit to the toilet seat, I'd say it's a good buy. The splash guard is a two sided affair; one side being that it's useful when she's all the way back and the other being when she doesn't quite make it the urine kind of goes into the seat on top of the guard. It's easy to clean though, the soft part pops right off. It's easy to take to grandma's, the character is appealing to my daughter, and she's had a very good success rate ever since we brought this home. I would use it again for my second child.

This potty seat may work well for a girl, but it's awful for a boy. The pee guard is very low & if my son doesn't sit way to the back of the seat, he ends up peeing over the guard & the urine gets all over the crease between the cushion & the plastic of the seat. It's a mess to clean up & is really unhygenic. It also fits terribly on elongated toilet seats. I replaced it with the Baby Bjorn seat, which works very well & has an adjustable flange on the back to get it to fit the toilet seat. I highly recommend BB seats. No affiliation, just a very happy customer.

I like this seat mostly because Elmo seems to have magical powers over little ones! If your kid is like mine, however, and likes to sit on the potty "unproductively" you might want to consider something a little more comfortable. The plastic frame that the cushion sits on has a rim around the inside. While your child is sitting, the fairly cheaply made cushion settles down and your child's butt is now resting on the edge of the hard plastic. Our daughter would always get up and complain about her butt hurting. Depending on what kind of toilet seat you have, it also has a tendency to slip around. I had to put some non-skid pads on the bottom so that it wouldn't fall into the toilet with a toddler's wiggling around. You could end up with pinched fingers or a soaked tot.

Bought this for my 2 year old daughter when she started showing interest in using the potty. I echo other's complaints that it is not good for elongated toilet seats & slides back when my daughter tries to sit down. However, my daughter's biggest complaint is that it is uncomfortable and cuts into the backs of her legs. The pee guard is not removable so if she sits on the potty with her pants around her ankles the pee guard cuts into her legs. If she sits on the potty seat without pants on (and thus can spread her legs wider) the padding compresses and the plastic ring of the potty cuts into her legs.

The Elmo print is cute and my daughter loves Elmo but the design flaws have left me in search of a new seat that she likes more.

Really, how hard can it be to design one of these things? This fails for two basic reasons:

1) It slides backwards on the toilet seat making it unstable and hard for my daughters to sit down. This is an enormous design flaw.

2) The pee guard is basically flush with the seat, so what is its purpose other than to decrease the actual potty-business real estate? It takes away room for daughters' pee to go down. And it's not high enough to save my baby boy from getting soaked when my daughter didn't clamp her knees shut tightly enough to prevent her pee from shooting cleanly over the guard and onto baby's head. He was not pleased. Neither was I.

I also have a two mini-potties, the Fisher Price froggy and singing ducky. The pee guard on the froggy potty is great. I love this low-tech seat as it's easy to clean and hands down my twin daughters' favorite. The singing duck potty was more expensive, is much harder to clean, is annoyingly loud and wakes up the baby, and there are a lot more spills due to the lack of pee guard. Highly recommend the froggy potty if you are in the market.

We bought this potty seat simply because they have it in our two-year old's family day care, and we thought she would appreciate the consistent look and feel (she did). We were immediately surprised that the potty seat was very loose fitting in all of the toilets in our house. Not knowing better, we assumed that this was as good as it got with potty seats.

Our daughter had been using it for a couple months when disaster struck. She was happily singing on the potty and kind of wiggling from side to side to the song when the potty slipped and actually fell right into the toilet with her on top of it.

Luckily, my wife was right there, but it was very scary for all involved. I definitely do not recommend traumatizing your child when you are trying to teach him or her the "goodness of the potty".

Ultimately we did what we should have done in the first place, and we looked at the reviews of the various potty seats on Amazon. If only we had known that this one has a less than stellar reputation. We ended up with the Baby Bjorn potty seat (also available on Amazon), which has a dial that adjusts the snugness of the fit, and it can be easily customized to the size of any seat you might run into. It costs a lot more, but it is worth every penny.

So, if you have the typical oval (elongated) toilet seat, stay away from this one. I am giving it two stars (rather than the one star it probably deserves) only because children are clearly attracted to the Sesame Street characters on it like moths to a flame, which probably helps them accept the idea of trying out a potty seat in the first place.