I want to start eating meals as a family but there are so many hurdles to overcome

@OwlBeThere it is, I am sure possible to have quality family interaction without sharing a meal time but for most families making a point of eating together is the easiest option. Everyone has to eat, most people eat at roughly the same time each day so it is a point in the day when members of the household gather, share a meal and chat. No extra planning or thought required.
Culturally shared meals are also quite a big event, most religions have some culture of shared dining. Significant milestones like birthdays or weddings usually involve eating together.

Of course there are families who for lots of different reasons can not share meal times and they have other ways to have those bonding experiences and check in with each other but they I would imagine need to be planned, for most families eating together is just easier.

Well it obviously isn’t fine as he’s unable to sit and eat quietly for a few minutes. Please, please switch it off and put it in the loft. He’s 6, he needs you to choose proper parenting over quick fixes with long term side effects.

As just a small win to add to this thread...I didn't tackle the dining room tonight, but I did make dinner for all of us, at the same time, eating the same thing, at the kitchen island. No tablets or phones, and a lovely conversation about the difference between a squid and an octopus led by DS.

I appreciate there are many, many issues to deal with. But I'm really tired and tonight that feels like a little win that I'm going to celebrate. Thank you everyone 🥹

@Rockininthefreeworld and as kindly as possible, how did you get from dates with a man who has significant food issues and an aversion to shared mealtimes, to making not one but two babies.

I dated a chap twice and on the second date he told me about his mum's chilli. Mince, gravy and baked beans. I ran, slowed down only by the rolls of red flags.

It's ok to have sensory differences, we all have preferences. But, the world cannot stop because of that. Your DH needs to take responsibility for his own needs, he can open the window, light a candle whatever, but dictating is not healthy.

You are pandering to him which is modelling pandering to your children. Sometimes 'no" is a whole sentence. A firm no. A nothing doing no. A you can't manipulate me out of no. It can still be a kind no.

In allowing your DH to run the whole world in your home everyone is pandering to him and that is unhealthy, it reduces you, and your children are watching and learning.

Really? She says he may be ND. These are ways to compromise.

The alternative is to leave him and she doesn’t seem to want to do that. YET. All the PPs here, of course, are gearing straight to that.

Compromise will take the heat out of the situation and enable her to reassess and make rational decisions about how she wants to move forward. The knee jerk reaction on MN is to immediately move to LTB [easy when it is not your life you are blowing up and you are hiding behind a keyboard]. This may be the decision she ultimately needs to make, but RIGHT NOW, on an immediate day to day basis, she needs to dial down what is going on in her house and take the tension out of meal times for her children. If she does that, he may feel less overwhelmed and also be open to compromise. And consider an assessment/support if he is ND.

At the moment she is as unwilling to compromise as he is [eg. she wants them all to eat together, she does NOT want to use the kitchen island, she seems not to consider that he may feel the need to have a designated workspace rather than feel he must camp out in the dining room] and, as is obvious, she is fed up, emotional and using this space to rant because tensions are ramping up … and both parties seem to be becoming more and more entrenched in their positions which makes dialogue and compromise less and less possible.

But I am done here.

Because he works from home and needs the room 35 hours a week compared to the 4-7 hours a week the family spends eating? There is an island in the kitchen that can be used for childrens meals like 100s of 1000s of families in the country do, but it appears there is no spare room/office that he can use? Why create conflict when there is an easy solution - other than moving house to buy a bigger house where he can have a dedicated office?

@TwinklyStork I want to be mindful of all of this, but I don't know how to handle it. I don't necessarily think he's doing any of it on purpose, but what am I supposed to do? He won't get help, he doesn't think anything will help and won't even entertain it

You have a hankering for ‘family mealtime’ that doesn’t seem to align with other family members’ circumstances or desires. Why should it prevail?

So you’d give him exactly what he wants and pander to his controlling behaviour?

These are awful suggestions.

Because he works from home and needs the room 35 hours a week compared to the 4-7 hours a week the family spends eating? There is an island in the kitchen that can be used for childrens meals like 100s of 1000s of families in the country do, but it appears there is no spare room/office that he can use? Why create conflict when there is an easy solution - other than moving house to buy a bigger house where he can have a dedicated office?

Entire family of ND people here. All with their individual idiosyncrasies. In your shoes (and we have fussy eaters, a couple over sensitive to smells etc) i’d do the following.

I’d make the dining room his office and be done with it. Door closed. End off.
I’d make the kitchen island work (all my friends use this, the dining room is only used on high days and holiday and/or when we have visiting family).
I’d feed the kids separately, joining them most days, and early in the evening with a wide range of foods - prepared with windows wide open, doors closed and husband’s space also closed off.
I’d feed him whatever beige, unscented food he wants later in the evening when he’s finished work (this is not different to my DH eating when he comes home at 730/8pm, my kids having eaten at 6pm, even as teenagers).
I’d do a family meal that everyone can eat together once or twice at weekends.

This doesn’t fix the other stuff.. and again I say we are an entirely ND household and NO ONE is allowed to entirely dictate the rules, but we do accept that DH works long hours and can be tired at the weekends/evenings. He’s also not the fussy eater (DD is, DS was) but he HATES food smells permeating the house and lingering in bedrooms. Eldest/DD is the same and won’t eat if DH/DD are having a curry and will insist upon waiting until later in the evening to grab her own meal. As it’s not every night, we let this go. No need to make every meal a battle.

We also changed the kitchen doors, coincidentally, to fire-doors (loft conversion) and in fact they are excellent at keeping smells confined to the kitchen, so we use windows and the extractor fan and contain it this way. I actually can now appreciate the fact that the smells in the bedroom can be a bit rank when someone forgets to close the doors these days (slow cooking tends to lead to lingering food smells).

I would be ignoring him about the dining room, that’s what it’s made for FFS
he can sort his own food out, you sit and eat with the children so they get one parent modelling family meals