For me, reading baby sleep books frightened me into thinking my baby had to learn to self settle. 'They say' inability to self settle is the cause of all other sleep problems: catnapping during the day, frequent night wakings, etc. You can assist a newborn, or a one, two or three month old, but older babies will start waking after an hour or two of sleep if they are unable to self settle. The books make you believe that your baby's sleep issues are a direct result of how you parent them to sleep, scare you into sleep training with the prospect of years of sleepless nights, and for nervous new mums like me, want you to believe that there's a one size fits all approach to all babies - if you can make your bub fit the textbook, then you're doing it right.

Took me a long time to accept DS wasn't a textbook! Though I'm still not sure his catnapping isn't my fault... Sigh.
Absolutely, this is me. I'm the same, still not sure that there was nothing more I could have done. DD always catnapped about 20 mins during the day, eventually I gave up putting her down and just held her through her sleeps. She takes about an hour to fall asleep and has only just started occassionally sleeping through at almost 3. I tried all the things the CHN recommended, we went to a sleep school who wanted us to let her cry it out at 4 months old (CIO is the one thing I won't do), read a lot, but when I couldn't get any of that to work I just fed and rocked to sleep and co-slept.

The heartbreak for me was the implications that my dd would be so sleep deprived that it would somehow effect her development. At some stage I thought - well kids don't starve themselves, and I am sure that if she gets to the stage where the lack of sleep is actually harming her that she will have to just shut down and sleep. So I just tried to make her feel safe so that she could pass out when needed. At 20 months we night weaned so I could get preggers and it was pretty traumatic.