3 year old sleep issue

Normally, if he has a nap during the day, his bedtime is 9pm. He usually doesn't fall asleep till 10 but he stays in his room contently till he falls asleep and wakes up around 7:30. Most of the time if he doesn't have a nap during the day, we lay him down at 8-8:30 and he is asleep by 9. On the days he doesn't nap, he usually wakes up from 3 am to 6 am ish, and falls back asleep around 6 till maybe 8:30 am (so we've been trying to make sure he gets a nap to prevent this). But now, even when he's had a nap he'll wake up around 3 am and want to stay up for a few hours. Like, he just can not fall back asleep. He'll stay in his room if I make him but he just can't fall asleep for a long, long while. A lot of the time he'll come in our room to go potty, tell me he doesn't want to go back to sleep, etc. So I have been laying him in bed with us, just so I don't have to get up (I work full time and have to get up at 4:45 am for work). He doesn't usually fall asleep at all, sometimes he does. When he doesn't fall asleep with us, after a while he'll ask to go back to his room and he'll fall asleep in there. When he was a lot younger and still in his crib, he went through a phase for about 6-9 months where he would wake up from 3-5/6 am and just be awake in his crib, not crying, so we just let him be while we slept because we didn't know what to do...It seems like this is starting to happen again now and we still don't know what to do.

Is this a sleep issue that needs to be addressed? Most of the time he sleeps through the night but the past few months he's been doing this more often and we don't know how to handle it.

I would consider easing into a whole new bedtime routine. And see if that helps. I have never had any issues with my girls they all slept through the night since birth and never changed.

But my froends dd was doing that for a while and still does at times at almost 8 yrs old and honestly from an out sider looking in, it was the bad sleep routine they had her in for her age.
I would think maybe lowering the initial time of bed at night time and maybe not having a nap at all, do kids still nap at 3? Curious, I cut out my kids naps at 18 months or so. lol
Maybe try a 7:30pm bed time out by 8pm and if he wakes in the night time, go in and tell him he needs to go back to sleep.

Oh I would start by waking him 1 hr earlier in the morning so he is tired earlier at night (to make up for earlier bedtime later) Thats what my friend ended up doing she woke her dd an hour earlier in the morning and put her down an hr earlier at night and after a few days she would let her sleep in the morning till she woke up on her own, but got tired at the new bedtime like clock work, and with no naps at all, she was sleeping through the night and not waking to just be awake in her room.

Its worth a shot, I know not all kids will adapt to something like this, but you never know.

Quoting crazy coupon lady:" I would consider easing into a whole new bedtime routine. And see if that helps. I have never had any ... [snip!] ... to just be awake in her room. Its worth a shot, I know not all kids will adapt to something like this, but you never know."

I just told DH that I'm going to try getting him up before I leave for work routinely and see if that changes anything. He had stopped napping for a while and it was great because I could put him to bed earlier but then we got sick for like 2 months starting in January and he started napping again. A couple weeks ago we tried to take the nap away but that's when he started this 3am thing again......

Thank you for replying