..Or worse still, both.
Aka they keep the room, but "re-organise" the stuff. Its some Freudian control-freak urge to tinker with your personality, through the symbolic proxy of your stuff, embarked on with military force once youre not there to divebomb across the doorway, sobbing howls of despair.

My Mum is a veteran of this - every uni holiday I'd have to evict the LACY THINGS and TEDDY BEARS she'd seen fit to invade my room with, and salvage books/CDs from the garage.
The specific problem here being the expectations never settled well on the offspring - I hated dresses and pulled the heads of all the Sindy dolls ever bought for me as a kid. Later I liked bikes, horrible music and computers. Poor Mum wanted a nice daughter she could dress up in homemade frilly victorian dresses.
Note - packing your kid off to school in said frilly victorian monstrosity will leave them (a) bullied and ostracised (b) rabidly despising such items with even more vehemance. This is Not The Waaay... *shivers on couch sweating at Repressed Memories*

So in ze childs absence ze proxy-chi represented by her stuff gets zee remodellink. Eet must be ze obsessive clingy-parent thing, yes? and ees suprisingly common. A girl at work, after moving out, returned to find her room re-decked as a shrine to Disney. She *hates* Disney :(
(Hikikomori** watching cartoons on, Thu 14 Aug 2008, 23:15, Reply)