Does your toddler eat with you?

Having a stressful crisis at the moment. We’ve got a few food issues and I’m stuck on what to do.

My 16mo little boy has always been a picky eater. Never had that awesome baby phase where they eat everything. He’s just has like 10 things he eats and nothing else. The biggest one for us was dinner. He refused to eat dinner ever. I’ve been weaning him recently and am successfully down to just a morning feed - sickness not included - but whilst trying to get him to eat dinner we realised he’d eat dinner if the TV was going. Great, worked a treat to wean the bedtime and night feeds. But now he won’t eat dinner without TV. If he doesn’t eat dinner, he wakes all night hungry.

He will only eat spaghetti in the frozen ‘Mini Meals’ or air fried potato. I’ve read into the division of responsibility, I understand to just give them what you eat and that’s it. But I’m the one paying the price with all the night wakes. Does this actually work for anyone?

Lastly, his bedtime is 7. He’s naturally an early riser so not matter the bedtime, he’ll wake at 6 so an earlier bedtime works better for us. That means dinner is around 5/5:30. I don’t really want to eat then. I absolutely see the value in eating dinner all together but what do the folks of early bedtimes do? All the advice I read is with bedtimes of 8 or later and any parenting after 7:30 is unpaid overtime in my opinion!!!

TL:DR what does dinner look like for you with a picky eater?