iWader said:

Use Carbon. Laravel uses it under the hood for all its date/time related stuff, it makes date/times really easy to work with and works seamlessly with Eloquent.

https://github.com/briannesbitt/Carbon http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/eloquent#timestamps http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/eloquent#date-mutators

Child model

<?php

use Carbon\Carbon;

class Child extends Eloquent {
...

   public function getDates()
   {
       return ['created_at', 'updated_at', 'dob'];
   }

   public function setDobAttribute($value)
   {
       $this->attributes['dob'] = Carbon::createFromFormat('d/m/Y', $value);
   }

...
}

Now when you populate your model with data the dob field is automatically converted into a Carbon object (Make sure you validate input to the needed format), and likewise when you access $child->dob after pulling a model from the DB you automatically have an instance of Carbon to work with.

Works perfect thanks