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 Campus gave millions of viewers college hockey players who check in, ask questions, and look out for the women in their lives. Then the Cornell fraternity sexual assault allegations made national headlines, along with disturbing messages reportedly shared in a fraternity group chat. Her plans for this episode changed. Lucy brings in a perspective on the difference between consent and care. Care asks whether a person feels safe, feels comfortable, and is in any state to make a…

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 introverted and saves his energy for a few close friends. One sits down and knocks out his homework right away, while the other works better with a deadline. Raising twins showed Kelly early that two kids under one roof need to be parented differently. This year Kelly stopped packing their backpacks so the boys could build their own executive functioning skills, and she explains why she is willing to let them be late. She also shares what happened last year when another boy at the playground…

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 long before they became mothers, by the roles they grew up watching and a modern job description for motherhood no one could ever meet. Lucy confesses her own mom guilt over a basket of unfolded laundry, and Stacy shares how she helps clients trace where that critical voice comes from. She explains why “I” statements carry more weight for women raised to stay quiet, and what to do when a partner agrees in the moment and nothing changes. Fair Play by Eve Rodsky can feel like a…

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 the seven touchstones they built their wedding ceremony and marriage around. Krissa cooks and Julia cleans. Julia schedules the checkups and Krissa keeps each day on track. When Krissa realized she kept landing in the kitchen prepping food while Julia got the fun part with their son, they talked about it and found a fairer way to divide the morning. Gratitude in relationships runs through all of it. Julia and Krissa thank each other for small things and have learned to ask when the thanks doesn't…

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 about how the responsibilities at home would change. Lucy asks how Eileen found her village then and why building that kind of support can feel harder for parents today. After nearly 30 years in the classroom, Eileen also saw major changes in the boys she taught. Earlier in her career, many boys seemed to have a clearer sense of what came next after high school. Over time, she saw more students struggle to figure out where they fit as their options…

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 are actually absorbing once the algorithm gets them there. At the center of it is a dangerous idea: that men are born without value and have to earn it through money, strength, status, and attention from women. Lucy connects that message to therapist Terry Real's distinction between healthy self-esteem and performance-based self-esteem, and traces the childhoods behind some of the biggest names selling this content. She…

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 why that difference changed her postpartum recovery completely. She and Lucy get into the list Victoria and her husband built together, naming every task that keeps a home running, and the exact language she uses now when dividing household responsibilities without becoming the house manager who reminds him of everything. They also take on the maternal instinct myth, the idea that mothers are simply born knowing what to do while fathers get room to learn as they go.…

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, Lori shifted full-time into what she calls the economy of care. Her experience eventually led her to Fair Play, the system created by Eve Rodsky, and a new way of thinking about how families talk about household responsibility. For parents looking for a fair play method for kids, Lori's approach starts with helping children see themselves as participants in family life rather than occasional helpers. She points to research showing that the gender gap begins…

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 with a notebook. Six months postpartum, Jess's partner asked her to write down everything on her mind. What poured out wasn't a to-do list. It was a heaping pile of expectations no one could realistically meet, and that mental load became the work of Rule Breaker. Jess pulls out her childhood report cards to get at something deeper: judgment. We're raised being graded, taught to prove ourselves against a fixed set of expectations, and no one ever sends the memo…

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 she returned to the States, she found playgrounds full of mothers who said they did not find their people until their kids started school. That gap became the reason she created The Parent Collective. Jessica explains how to build a support system as a new mom when those connections do not happen automatically. Her advice is simple, though not always easy: choose something you genuinely care about, put yourself in places where you will see the same people regularly,…

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 begin much earlier, through what boys learn about relationships, attention, and emotional intelligence at home. When mothers carry the mental load and become the parent everyone relies on, sons absorb that model of partnership. Fathers may miss everyday opportunities to build closeness through caregiving, chores, and the ordinary work of family life. Screens can deepen the disconnect by replacing the slower experiences that…

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 setup, he stepped back and tried to figure out how to genuinely take ownership at home. He searched for guidance and found almost nothing useful. So he read every book and piece of research he could find, built an advisory board, and turned that search into a platform helping couples do the same. Brian breaks down why the mental load in marriage stays heavy even when a partner is willing to help. Willingness is not ownership. Real ownership means…

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 thought she'd have, and how it shaped the intentional way she parents her sons today. The conversation turns to the mental load in marriage. Sarah orders the groceries, builds the shared calendar, and keeps a Sunday whiteboard with the week's schedule; her husband cooks, coaches, covers carpool and genuinely enjoys vacuuming. Lucy and Sarah unpack why so many men still tie their worth to an outdated definition of "provider," and how invisible labor shows up in a modern…

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. A year later she was standing at her kitchen sink with an endless pile of pump parts, listening to a podcast about rebalancing the work of running a household. She was the one carrying the invisible to-do list, the mental load of anticipating, remembering, and coordinating. And she found herself asking why fixing it was her job too. That's where the two questions collided. How do I raise boys who stay connected, and why is so much of running our household falling on me? They were two pieces of the…

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 studying how gender dynamics play out at home. As a wife and boy mom, she’s still working them out in her own family. Each week, The ManFlu brings together researchers, thinkers, and families themselves to explore emotional labor, modern partnerships, and how we raise more connected boys. Together, we examine why these patterns persist, how they affect families, and the practical shifts that build stronger partnerships today and help break old patterns for the next generation.…