WASHINGTON — The government has made a change in its policy for patting down young children at airport checkpoints, and more are promised.

Airport security workers will now be told to make repeated attempts to screen young children without resorting to invasive pat-downs, the head of the Transportation Security Administration said today. The agency is working to put that change in place around the country, and it should reduce, but not eliminate, pat-downs for children, an agency spokesman said.

There was public outrage in April over a video of a 6-year-old girl getting a pat-down in the New Orleans airport. She was patted down, John Pistole said, because she moved during the electronic screening, causing a blurry image.

That kind of pat-down was put in place partly because of the Nigerian man who got past airport security, boarded a plane with explosives hidden in his underpants and tried to use the bomb to bring down the airliner over Detroit on Christmas 2009.

But this screening has been criticized as being too intrusive and an unnecessary measure for children and older people who seem to pose no terror threat.