I did not produce sufficient quantities of milk to breastfeed my oldest.
Pumped like a cow for my preemie middle child.
My youngest latched, but again, not enough milk. Pumped for 6 weeks.
What I did do was lots of skin contact, humming, singing, talking to them, and cuddling, and affection. All my kids are top level students.
Breastfeeding is best, but if you can’t, then physical interaction is best.
They were able to get your colostrum. That stuff is liquid gold!
My wife was one of those moms that wouldn’t give up breast feeding our son. She was VP of HR for a well-known auto manufacturer in Europe at the time and would take pump breaks often plus fed in person when she got home.
(As Expats, we considered it bad form to take the generous maternity leave that was offered.)
The kid was well nourished for 18 months or so.
But I have always attributed my son’s smarts to the fact that we hooked up a set of headphones to Walkman and played Mozart, Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald, Gene Harris and other classic music thru her stomach as often as we could.
She says that she could feel that he really enjoyed it!
He just made Dean’s List again at a Top 30 college, so I guess something worked out in his favor!
Skin to skin contact along with cuddling and playing with the baby is very important.
It’s good to pump as that lets you build up a stash in the freezer for when you can’t be with your baby or for when you are ill and might pass a flu virus or whatnot to them... also you might require a medication that would make it unwise to breastfeed and the frozen packets could carry you through such a time.
Also, just look at the bad spot many Moms are in with the formula shortage...
Recently a company sent me a few of their compact, rechargeable pumps. They are very powerful (perhaps too much so) they had a few bugs in the firmware that needed fixing. For one thing pressing a button on the device to change the suction level had no way to step down, only up... big mistake. You had to move from level 1 through 5 to get back to level one... no way to step backwards so you had to either endure the powerful levels to get back to a low level or disconnect the tubing, change the level and then re-connect to the pump... what a goofy setup! I wrote some code that changed it to a short press to go up a level and a long press to go down a level. I also added a cheap ESP32 board to enable controlling pump functions from a smartphone... this added a customizable let-down mode which is very handy.
The system does have a nice set of flanges that are flanges with a 5oz container integrated.. you can slip them into your bra and pump while doing other things, you don’t have to just sit there for 20 minutes of boring pumping while holding flanges...
I work with medical devices, some simple and some complicated, breast pumps are pretty simple devices.