My family friends Steve and Shelly Gaudreau own amazing restaurants in my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas. I grew up eating at their restaurants—and, more importantly, at their home, where they prepare the most insanely delicious meals and make it look like no effort at all. But when it comes to cooking for their family, Shelly and Steve face some challenges that many other families don't. They have two sons, Henry and Will. Will is a typically developing 13-year-old who loves to cook. But, their oldest son Henry, who's 17, has autism. This makes eating a challenge for him, due to a number of related sensory sensitivities. Here, Shelly talks about how they've learned to adapt and feed their family. –Emily Johnson

For my husband and me, like most people, food is something that's fun and exciting. We love to cook and try new foods and eat a wide variety of things. But for my son, Henry, food causes anxiety. So eating and cooking for him is about finding ways to reduce that anxiety so he can get the food he needs for fuel.

Henry loves eating salty, crispy foods like potato chips and would probably eat them for every meal if he could. When he was little, I'd want so much for him to eat more foods and get proper nutrition—I'd always beg him, just try it. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it; he couldn't venture out of eating the five or so foods that he was comfortable with. People will say, Well, they’ll eat when they’re hungry. But some kids just won’t. They full on won’t.

There are a lot of rules out there about how you should feed your family. You can find any number of statistics about the benefits of sitting down to meals together, like: If you eat dinner together as a family you’re more likely to have kids who graduate high school. But when we tried to conform to these rules—before we found the system and specific strategies that worked for us—mealtimes were very adversarial. I’ve had to learn that the rules just don't apply to us in a lot of ways. I've simply had to let it go. For example, people will tell you never, ever to let your kid watch television and eat at the same time, but when Henry was little, he would watch TV and eat because it was distracting enough that he could eat a little without anxiety or stress. And ultimately we needed him to eat.

Because Henry struggles with sensory processing, we make a separate meal for him, no matter what we’re eating—that's just how it has to be. We can’t eat together because the sight and the smell of our food makes him gag and sometimes even throw up. For a while, we tried putting up blockers so he could sit at the table with us, and he’d have a plate with three tall things around him so the sight and smell of our food wouldn’t distract or disgust him. Ultimately that didn’t work for us, though; he won’t eat in a room full of people. What works best for Henry is to have an earlier dinner by himself at the kitchen counter. Most of our day involves implementing some sort of therapy or rule or routine, so we give ourselves a pass when it comes to food. If Henry is upset, no one else will enjoy their meal either, and I don't want our family meals to be a battle scene.