The ManFlu | Exploring Gender Dynamics, Partnerships & Raising Boys Who Care

This episode discusses sexual assault, consent, and allegations of sexual misconduct involving college students. The Cornell allegations remain the subject of ongoing legal proceedings.

Most parents can explain the rules of consent to their sons. But consent is only the legal minimum. Will he notice when someone isn’t okay? Will he speak up when his friends cross a line? And will the grown men around him show him how?

In this solo episode of The ManFlu, host Lucy McAfee starts with a show she was excited to talk about. Prime Video’s Off...

It’s 7:43 AM, her boys still aren’t out the door, and our guest is sipping her coffee and saying nothing. Middle school parenting asks you to step back right when every instinct tells you to step in.

On this episode, host Lucy McAfee talks with her friend Kelly Wiethuchter, an ad tech sales leader and mom to fraternal twins, about raising boys through the transition to sixth grade. Kelly’s sons share a birthday, but not the same personality. One is an extrovert who wakes up asking who can hang out, and the other is more i...

You ask for help. He nods along. Next week looks exactly the same. If you've wondered how to talk to your husband about the mental load without it ending in tears or silence, this conversation is a good place to start.

On The ManFlu, host Lucy McAfee talks with Stacy McCann, a licensed therapist, writer, speaker, and parent coach whose practice focuses on maternal burnout. Stacy says many moms walk into her office assuming they are doing something wrong or that they are “broken.” Her job is to show them there was a path paved for them...

Julia Markish sat at a dinner party while the women around her swapped stories about burnout and the mental load. She has a wife, so she couldn't relate. Still her first thought was a guilty one: Am I the man in this story?

Host Lucy McAfee talks with Julia, an executive coach, and her wife Krissa Lagos, a book editor, in the first couple's interview on The ManFlu. When Lucy asked if Krissa would've had her own complaint at that dinner party, the answer was no. They both have their roles, and balance was one of...

Long before mental load and maternal burnout were in our common vernacular, our guest this week had a moment that clearly illustrated them: rushing out the door for work, unable to find a glove, and deciding that if she couldn't find it, she was done.

Host Lucy McAfee sits down with her mom, Eileen Goeke, a retired high school teacher and mother of four, to compare motherhood across two generations. Eileen lived in 10 houses in ten years, built new communities in small towns, and eventually returned to teaching without ever having a conversation with her husband...

The Manosphere doesn't need boys to go looking for it. Researchers who set up TikTok and YouTube accounts posing as teenage boys found it reached their feeds within 26 minutes, starting from nothing more than a fitness video or a gaming clip.

Host Lucy McAfee spends this episode of The ManFlu Podcast unpacking the Manosphere, the vast online world of influencers, podcasts, and communities shaping how boys think about masculinity, women, success, and their own worth. She uses Netflix's Adolescence and Louis Theroux's Inside the Manosphere as her way into the topic, then digs into what boys...

Some women carry the mental load in marriage so quietly that even their own husbands don't see it happening.

Host Lucy McAfee sits down with Victoria Tice, a copywriter and birth doula. Victoria has spent five years breastfeeding her two sons on demand, no pumps, no bottles, straight from the source.  And that choice opened up a much bigger conversation about partnership, recovery, and who carries what at home.

Victoria compares her husband's five days of paternity leave with their first son to the nearly four months he took with their second, and w...

What is a life spent caring for a family worth? Our guest learned an insurer's answer the day it reduced hers to three words: just a housewife. The work of making a house a home can hold enormous value and still be assigned none.

On The ManFlu, host Lucy McAfee talks with Lori Sugarman-Li, a family systems strategist, speaker, and Certified Fair Play Facilitator, about invisible labor, the mental load, and what children learn from watching who carries the work of home. After a 15-year marketing career with Kraft Foods and Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts...

Do you ever get to the end of the day, a day where you genuinely never stopped moving, and still feel like you somehow failed? That feeling usually isn't proof that you fell short. It's proof that you're chasing a standard that was never realistic to begin with.

Host Lucy McAfee talks with Jess Weisz, former McKinsey consultant, writer, coach, and creator of Rule Breaker, about the invisible standards behind working parent burnout, and why high-achieving parents can spend an entire day getting things done and still feel like they failed.

It started...

Everyone tells new parents it takes a village. Nobody mentions that making mom friends as an adult is genuinely hard and can feel more like dating: is it weird to ask for her number? Do I look like a stalker?

Host Lucy McAfee talks with Jessica Hill, founder and CEO of The Parent Collective, about building your village as a new mom. Jessica spent ten years in England, where prenatal classes grouped expectant parents by neighborhood and due date. She left with a built-in support system and friendships that lasted long after the newborn stage. When...

Connection isn't something boys lack. It's something that gets nurtured, at the dinner table, on the drive home, in all the small moments in between. And right now, screens are competing for too many of those moments.

Host Lucy McAfee talks with licensed marriage and family therapist Julie Messer about raising boys who can stay present, emotionally aware, and connected in a world built around quick rewards. As a therapist and fellow boy mom, Julie sees young men struggling with loneliness, anxiety, pornography, video games, and the ability to express what they feel. Those patterns often...

Our guest today irons his wife's clothes before putting them away, not because she asked, but because he understands that protecting her time is part of what providing means. This episode is about how he got there and what it really takes to build that kind of partnership.

Lucy McAfee sits down with Brian Page, founder of Modern Husbands, to talk about what equal partnership in marriage actually requires beyond good intentions. Brian spent years as a primary earner working 60 to 80 hours a week. When his wife's career took off and the family needed a different...

There's a specific grief a lot of boy moms feel but isn't often said out loud. It's one Sarah Koopmann and Lucy McAfee both know well, and after years of Lucy turning to Sarah for boy-mom wisdom, there was no question she'd be the very first guest.

On this episode of The ManFlu, the two best friends of 30 years sit down for a conversation about raising emotionally connected boys. Sarah is a full-time working mom to sons ages 16, 14, and 12, and an HR executive at a global aerospace company. She opens up about grieving the daughter she...

When boys grow up in a world where caring isn't expected of them, they become men who don't realize what they're missing.

In the first episode of The ManFlu, host Lucy McAfee traces her thinking back to a phone call six years ago. She was thirty-eight, pregnant with her second child, and when the nurse said "it's a boy," she cried. They weren't happy tears. She knew exactly what she was mourning, and it went far beyond the ruffles and the bows. It was the lifelong closeness she wasn't sure she'd have with her sons.

You’ve heard of the “ManFlu” — that mysterious illness that somehow hits men way harder than any woman could ever fathom. Well, we’re not handing out tissues. We’re here to talk about the real stuff underneath it: the disconnection, the imbalance, and how we can start to change it.

The ManFlu is a metaphor we use to dig into something deeper: the cultural scripts, gender roles, and unspoken rules that keep men sidelined and leave women carrying more than their share of the mental and emotional load.

Host Lucy McAfee has spent years stu...