Kids need more Activity.

“Parts of a CNN newsfeed”

Childhood obesity experts mention common solutions for reducing childhood obesity: require more physical education classes (training), improve the nutritional value of school meals, encourage kids to play more sports and put away the video games and cell phones.

Pate, the Heart Association spokesman, says parents can do their part by telling their kids to go outside and play.

But what about parents who are afraid to send their kids out to play? Pate says that statistics show that kids are safer than they’ve ever been, despite the lurid headlines on cable news.

Unless parents live in an awful neighborhood, they should encourage their kids to play outside with others and take common-sense safety precautions, he says.

“I do worry that with the 24-hour news cycle and the tendency to expose everyone to very unfortunate incidents that occur in one place, that some parents become hypersensitive to safety concerns,” he says.

Pate doesn’t just draw on his medical expertise to advise parents. He cites his own life. He grew up in upstate New York, where his family didn’t own a television until he was 5 years old, he says.

“I don’t really remember what I was doing before 5, but it wasn’t watching TV or surfing the Internet,” he says. “Staying inside was not very interesting.”

Pate’s kept his active lifestyle as an adult. He’s 62 now, but he’s never abandoned his desire to keep moving. He has run in three U.S. Olympic Trials marathons and in the Boston Marathon.

But when he drives through America’s silent communities now, he doesn’t see many kids running. He’s sorry that more kids don’t live the life he once did.

“I really do think the norm was that kids came home from school at 3 p.m. and the mom said, ‘Get out of here and be home for dinner,’ ” he says. “There were a lot of good reasons for that norm.”