We were lucky and there was a trial starting up when my daughter was diagnosed, comparing pumps with injections in newly diagnosed children. We joined the trial and got a pump 8 days after diagnosis, and never looked back.
Advantages:
Much more precise dosing (to nearest 0.1 unit, and basal doses are even smaller)
You can adjust the basal by the hour so if it's set correctly your child should be able to eat nothing at all for 24 hours and their blood sugar will stay stable
You can extend meal doses to cope with slow-digesting foods (so it will just drip the dose in slowly over an hour or two or however long you tell it to)
You can increase or decrease the background dose by a percentage for a few hours at a time, makes it easier to deal with things like exercise, illness, hormones and so on
Basically you can fine tune things much more tightly than you could with injections.
Disadvantages
Having to wear the thing 24/7 (although most people get used to this very quickly and hardly notice it any more)
More danger of DKA because you don’t have long-acting insulin in the body, instead of this the pump gives tiny doses of rapid-acting every few minutes. So if the pump stops for any reason or the cannula fails or something, you have no insulin at all working and blood sugars will rise very quickly. However if you are testing/scanning frequently you should pick up any problems before they get to danger levels.
It's harder work with a pump, sometimes I feel like I’m constantly fiddling with my daughter's pump settings and never quite getting it right, I’d find injections very crude by comparison though and wouldn't want to change back, the tighter control is worth the effort in my opinion, although I realise it wouldn’t suit everyone
Hope that helps 🙂
