Date changes to current date if PDF not opened in Adobe Acrobat

I created a few text fields and formatted them as Dates (m/d/yy). What was very cool was if someone typed in a date (such as March 5, 1989) the field would automatically change it to the correct format (3/5/89). However, I discovered that if you open the form using anything but Adobe Acrobat, that functionality would disappear. Instead, if you spelled out the date the field would automatically change to today's date (in the correct format). Extremely disappointing.

I spent an 1.25 hours with support but he couldn't fix it. It seems to be a bug in the software. Any ideas?