Well if your mothering skills are crap, so are mine . Both ds1 and ds2 were/are criers. In fact ds1 WOULDN'T be rocked cuddled or anything else to sleep - the choice was 10 minutes sob in a darkened room while I sat on the step outside berating myself for being an evil mother, or an hour or so heated crying with me walking up and down with him in my arms feeling absolutely crap for not being able to help him at all.
At least ds2 is somewhat soothable with rocking/walking/cuddling, although he does still like a good howl before bed - sometimes he does it in his cot, sometimes in my arms before I put him down. I keep reminding myself that ds1 became a very good independant sleeper so I can't have been all that bad, but still.
LTN has gone rather pearshaped in the last few weeks. It seems to be debateable whether I can get him down to sleep very quickly at all (unsettled for half hour plus) then only sleeps 45 minutes and that's it. He then gets extremely overtired even with an extra nap later on in the afternoon, and 5pm-7pm is an absolute nightmare.
Today though, we seemed to have a much better go of it. I kept him up a bit longer until he had more definite sleepy signs (which turned out to be around 12.05 - a full 20 minutes after I'd usually start trying to settle him) and he went down like a dream. He did wake up after 45mins but he didn't sound that persistant at crying and after about 3 minutes he'd settled himself... woke again about 20 mins later and grumbled again for 4 minutes then I didn't hear from him again until I went to pick him up at 2pm (we had to go out - otherwise I'd have opened the curtains and waited to see what time he awoke).
Fluke? Later settling time made a difference? Shrug. He's gone down for his evening sleep much better today too. Perhaps he's just getting better at self-settling.