Defining Date Mutator for a Date instead of Datetime

Hello, I have a field on my User model which is defined as a date, and I would like when it is serialized to output a date, and not a datetime. Refer to my hire_date field:

$ php artisan tinker
Psy Shell v0.8.2 (PHP 7.1.1 — cli) by Justin Hileman
>>> $user = User::find(1);
=> User {#772
     id: 1,
     first_name: "Nils",
     last_name: "Predovic",
     hire_date: "1980-08-13",  // OK
     created_at: "2017-03-10 20:23:37",
     updated_at: "2017-03-10 20:23:37",
   }
>>> $user->hire_date
=> Carbon\Carbon {#738  // OK
     +"date": "1980-08-13 00:00:00.000000",
     +"timezone_type": 3,
     +"timezone": "UTC",
   }
>>> $user->toArray()
=> [
     "id" => 1,
     "first_name" => "Nils",
     "last_name" => "Predovic",
     "hire_date" => "1980-08-13 00:00:00",  // Would like to be '1980-08-13'
     "created_at" => "2017-03-10 20:23:37",
     "updated_at" => "2017-03-10 20:23:37",
   ]
>>> 

I understand from the docs that fields defined as a date on the model are returned as Carbon instances, and are then serialized in a timestamp format, but I would like to override this when I have an explicit date field, and not datetime.

What I've come up with is to set an accessor for the field and reparse the date:

    public function getHireDateAttribute($hire_date)
    {
        return Carbon::parse($hire_date)->toDateString();
    }

but I'm wondering if there is a better way. Thank you.