For a system to maintain control, its interactions with its environment must have two components. First, all variation in inputs to the system must be filtered and reduced. Second, one's responses to variation in the environment must have a high degree of variation.

In the stereotypical family, the woman tends to handle inputs into the system, and the man tends to handle outputs. This is a bad thing, as men have a tendency to limit variation both on input and on output, while women amplify said variation just as uniformly. Mom overreacts to things she sees in the news and on daytime television, buys useless crap, and interacts with the environment under conditions of incredible social and legal constraint, while Dad goes to a bureaucratic or industrial job where he formulates uncreative, uniform output and isolates himself from inputs into the family.

I'm not saying that the solution is a simple role reversal, as these roles were created specifically to accommodate a broken model for how families should be built. I just believe that cybernetics offers a good abstract outline both for what is wrong with the system and for the basic frame that any future system should fit into, a frame that I believe could accommodate a very wide variety of social groupings.