Breast Pumps - the Good and the Bad

Many women start to use breast pumps immediately postpartum. Pumping can help with milk letdown and can stimulate production. Alternatively, milk can be pumped and then fed to the baby in a bottle, allowing for others to feed the baby, and also allowing the quantity of milk consumed to be monitored. Some women “pump ahead” and purposefully try to produce more milk than the baby needs so the extra can be stored. This is often done in preparation for returning to work. This is the good part, but there is also a negative aspect to using breast pumps.

Being in Sync with your newborn

Relying on breast pumps, even partly, can lead to breast milk overproduction and to lack of synchronization with the baby. What is synchronization? This is when a breast-feeding woman’s milk production and timing is closely related to the baby’s feeding cycles. Not every nursing mom achieves this but many come close. When the baby is breastfed exclusively on demand, and no pump is used, it is possible for the mother’s milk production to exactly match the baby’s needs. When the baby is hungry, the breasts are hard and full about the same time. At night, the mother might wake up because her breasts become hard and tender, and within moments may hear that the baby is waking up and is hungry.

If the pump is used too often, milk overproduction disrupts this timing. The breasts may become hard and full while the baby is asleep. Pumping will empty them, but then an hour later when the baby gets hungry, he/she will be fed with breast milk in a bottle because the breasts are empty of milk from the recent pumping, and this can keep on happening.

It can be very tiring to pump the breasts 6-8 times a day (about 10-20 minutes per session), and to bottle feed the baby 6-8 times per day as well.