Cornelius Vanderbilt wanted to run away and be a sailor. This was crazy, his mother knew. It would not just be a hard life, but an awful life. He should not join the navy or stow away. Besides, they needed him at home.

Yet, like a parent has to understand, she grasped that trying to forbid something was the fastest way to ensure it happened. “Phoebe Vanderbilt knew her son well enough to sense that he did not really want to run away to be a sailor,” Arthur T. Vanderbilt II writes in Fortune’s Children: The Fall of The House of Vanderbilt, “he was negotiating. What he truly wanted was a boat of his own so he could become a boatman on New York Harbor.” Instead of forbidding it, instead of trying to argue with him—his mother tried the softer touch we talked about a while back.

She offered him a deal: If he could plough and plant an uncultivated 8-acre plot on their property, she’d loan him the money to buy his own boat. Vanderbilt, a determined and ambitious kid, promptly did just that. And he turned that boat loan into a business empire that spanned the globe. Phoebe, you could say, made one of the greatest investments in history by practicing a little patience, a little understanding, and a little creativity.

The next time your kids want to do something you’re against, or that worries you or even that you know better than to do, try to channel that energy. Don’t just say no. Think about what they really want. See it as a negotiation. Help them help themselves. Don’t crush their dreams. Direct them towards the best way to achieve them.

You never know where they might end up.