10 Things for the Bathroom With a Toddler In It
The bathroom is the smallest room in the house and the one where the most goes wrong.
It is where you find out that your child cannot reach the tap, that the toilet is loud and enormous, and that the ninety seconds you need them to sit still is about eighty seconds longer than they intend to give you. Almost none of that is a training problem. Most of it is a room problem.
Ten things below, chosen for the stretch between the first potty and the day they can use a normal toilet without you standing there.
Ten things in three groups. Ratings are live Amazon ratings, never ours.
- 1
A low potty with a lift out bowlBest if you only buy one thing - 2
A toilet seat with the child seat built inBest for a shared family bathroom - 3
A second built in seat for the other bathroomBest for a house with two toilets - 4
Disposable potty linersBest for the parent who is doing the cleaning - 5
Training pants that pull upBest for nights and long car journeys - 6
Cotton training pants they can feelBest for daytime learning - 7
The plain potty picture bookBest for the child who will not sit - 8
A character book about using the toiletBest if a familiar face helps - 9
A short book to keep by the pottyBest for the basket beside the seat - 10
Something to aim atBest for standing up and for your floor
Group one
The seat, and the argument about which one
Everything else in this room is secondary to where the child actually sits. A toddler perched high on an adult toilet with their legs dangling is being asked to relax in a position no adult would choose, and a lot of what gets called refusal is really that.
A low potty with feet flat on the floor solves it in one move. The version with a bowl that lifts out is worth the small extra, because the part you will do forty times a week is the emptying.
BabyBjrn Smart Potty, Powder Pink/White
As an Amazon Associate, Decoded Kids earns from qualifying purchases. Price checked live on Amazon.
Once they are tall enough and confident, a seat built into the lid of the family toilet is the tidier long term answer. Nothing to store, nothing to trip over, and no separate seat that a visiting adult has to move.
If there are two toilets in the house, fitting both is worth doing at the same time. The upstairs one being ready and the downstairs one not is how you end up carrying a toddler up a flight of stairs at speed.
Group two
The things that make the mess survivable
Almost nobody gives up on potty training because the child cannot do it. They give up because the adult is worn down, and the thing that wears the adult down is the cleaning.
Liners are unromantic and they are the single biggest change to how the week feels. Lift, tie, done, and the potty goes back without a trip to the sink.
![[30 Counts] Disposable Potty Liners Compatible with OXO Tot 2-in-1](https://parents-and-kids.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/B07S8MQF74__30-counts-disposable-potty-liners-compatible-with-oxo-tot-2-in-1-300x300.jpg)
[30 Counts] Disposable Potty Liners Compatible with OXO Tot 2-in-1
Pull up pants have one good use and one bad one. They are right for nights, long journeys and the first week of nursery. They are wrong as the daytime default, because they feel like a nappy and a child who cannot feel anything has nothing to learn from.
For the day, cotton is the point. They are meant to be noticed. A wet leg is information, and it is the fastest teacher in this whole process. If things have gone backwards after a good start, that is normal enough that we wrote about why potty training regresses separately.
Group three
The things that buy you ninety seconds
Sitting still is boring, and a bored toddler stands up. That is the entire problem in the third group, and the fix is not a reward chart. It is having something in reach.
A basket of books beside the potty does more than any gadget. Keep them in the bathroom, do not let them migrate, and they stay interesting because they only exist in that room.
Potty: (A Toilet Training Story of Bathroom Independence for Babies
Some children need a familiar face to make it feel ordinary rather than new. A character they already trust doing the same thing is a shortcut worth taking.
Keep at least one that is genuinely short. The long ones get chosen deliberately by a child who has worked out that reading time is negotiating time.
For a boy learning standing up, a target changes the accuracy and your mopping in the same week. If timing rather than aim is the issue, a wrist reminder can help, and we compared them in the best potty training watches.
What we would skip this year
A potty that plays a tune when it is used. It turns the potty into a toy, which is fine for a fortnight and a problem after that, because the interesting bit stops being the toilet and starts being the noise.
A step stool bought before the seat. People buy the stool first because it is cheap, then find the child still will not climb up. Get the sitting sorted, then add the height. There is a fuller comparison in our learning tower and step stool piece.
Anything that only works in your bathroom. Nursery, grandparents and school all have their own toilets, and a child whose routine depends on one specific gadget is stuck everywhere else. If the school toilet is the sticking point, we went into that in why children are scared of the school toilet.
The honest caveat: potty training is one of the most variable things children do, and no product on this list will move a child who is not ready. Ratings are live Amazon ratings pulled from our product library rather than typed in by us.
More on toddlers, routines and the bathroom
Questions parents ask
What do you actually need in the bathroom to start potty training?
Less than most lists suggest. A low potty the child can sit on with their feet flat, something to look at while they sit, and a way to empty it that does not take you five minutes. Everything else, including stools, charts and gadgets, can wait until you know which part is actually hard for your child.
Standalone potty or a seat on the big toilet?
Start with the standalone potty for most toddlers. Feet on the floor makes a real physical difference and the height is far less frightening. Move to a built in seat once they are climbing confidently and asking to use the big one, which for a lot of children is several months later rather than several weeks.
What if the toddler is scared of the toilet flushing?
Flush after they have left the room for a while, and say that is what you are doing so it is a plan rather than a surprise. Fear of the flush is extremely common and it fades once the noise stops arriving without warning. Forcing them to stand there while it happens tends to set the whole thing back.
Leave the first comment
Share your thoughts
I'm for the parent mid-meltdown - theirs or the kid's. I write from the actual floor of it: the crying that won't stop, the dinner thrown, the bedtime that unravels. Blunt because I respect you too much to pretend it's easy. Just what tends to actually work.
More from NourWhat's the one thing that actually calmed the chaos in your house?
No right answers here - tell us how it actually went. Someone reading needs to hear it.
Join the conversation