Scotland's chief medical officer was talking about love yesterday. Not the stuff of Shakespeare sonnets and red roses, but how a mother comforts a crying baby or responds to their smiles. In his second annual report, Dr Harry Burns focuses on his pet theory: that adversity in infancy causes biological changes that can stunt a child's life chances. Others share this view, including the police-led Violence Reduction Unit and Alan Sinclair, who reported on the issue for the Work Foundation.

Scotland's chief medical officer was talking about love yesterday. Not the stuff of Shakespeare sonnets and red roses, but how a mother comforts a crying baby or responds to their smiles. In his second annual report, Dr Harry Burns focuses on his pet theory: that adversity in infancy causes biological changes that can stunt a child's life chances. Others share this view, including the police-led Violence Reduction Unit and Alan Sinclair, who reported on the issue for the Work Foundation.

In the past decade, policymakers have dwelled on improving the health and education of primary-school children and expanding the provision of good-quality nursery education. But there is mounting evidence that by the age of three the future health and wellbeing of thousands of children in Scotland already have been compromised. These children are more likely to fail at school and in the jobs market, end up in prison, suffer ill health and die early. It follows that if the country's shocking health and social inequalities are to be tackled, more intervention and support are necessary in the first years of life. The government's early-years strategy aims to integrate early education and care services, providing more support to those who need it most. Yet sometimes what happens on the ground seems to flow in the wrong direction: Glasgow's decision to do away with qualified nursery teachers, for example, or the phasing out of health visitors.

Intervening in the lives of little children may smack of the nanny state, but where there is plentiful evidence that many of them are not being adequately parented, the government cannot just stand by. Schemes such as Triple P (Positive Parenting Programme), piloted in Glasgow, show that teaching skills such as consistently applying ground rules, praising good behaviour and providing a healthy diet can have a transforming impact. If such programmes are capable of improving a neglected child's prospects, then we should be finding the resources to fund them, even if that means cutting back elsewhere. It is hard to see where that support will come from when the SNP-led government is struggling to meet manifesto commitments on class sizes, waiting times and student debt. Are any of those really more important than this? If Britain's welfare state is to live up to its billing of cradle-to-grave support, more needs to be done for those who are currently failing in the first three years.