What was going on when I was born?

''IT'S not easy to raise children and work at the same time,'' Stephen Segal told the 19 Bankers Trust employees assembled in a conference room in the company's Park Avenue skyscraper. ''If you're a man,'' he said, looking at one of the four men in the room, ''the chances are that your father was not as closely involved in parenting as you. And if you're a woman the chances are your mother didn't work in the way you are. I think it's helpful to think of yourselves as pioneers.''

If I were asked to define the difference between house restoration and renovation,'' Dr. Theodore Lindauer says, ''I would say $100,000.'' Dr. Lindauer, a Los Angeles psychiatrist, knows the distinction well. He recently completed six years of work restoring the Edwards House, an International style classic in the Los Angeles hills designed by the California architect Gregory Ain. The house was called the year's best by the national architectural press in 1936 and is one of the few modernist houses to be restored in the United States. Although Dr. Lindauer had access to original drawings, and the help of the retired architect himself - who had chanced by one day on a semiannual bicycle tour of his old buildings - the task for Dr. Lindauer was long and expensive. As an old modernist building, the Edwards House also presented certain restoration difficulties different from those of 19th-, 18thor 17th-century houses. Restoring houses to a particular period may seem a well-defined alternative to simply fixing them up, but in fact buildings from each period pose different questions, not only about specific techniques and materials, but also about such invisible realities as the everyday living patterns and social attitudes built into floor plans characteristic of a period.

The Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee today endorsed legislation to strengthen the health warning on cigarette packages. The proposal, supported by a 15-to-1 vote, would replace the current general warning with a specific one saying, ''Warning: Cigarette Smoking Causes Cancer, Emphysema And Heart Disease; May Complicate Pregnancy And Is Addictive.'' Although the bill has no provision for the warning to accompany cigarette advertising, Senator Bob Packwood, Republican of Oregon, is expected to offer an amendment requiring the warning in advertising when the measure is considered by the full Senate. The committee's strong endorsement, especially by its more conservative members, and signs of the tobacco industry's willingness to compromise indicate that some legislative changes involving the cigarette warning label may pass the Senate this year.

The credit markets have been on edge recently because of fears that the Federal Reserve might have decided to tighten credit and thereby cause interest rates to rise. The most closely watched interest rate of all is the rate for overnight loans between banks, known as the Federal funds rate. Wall Street economists say they are not sure if the Fed has tightened its policy. But an increase in the Federal funds rate could be a sign that the Fed has made an adjustment.

Data General, the big computer manufacturer, had exported its products to Mexico for years. In 1980 the company had a 5 percent share of a $400 million market that was expanding by roughly 30 percent a year. The country's financial difficulties cut into the growth of the computer market, but Data General continued to ship its products. Last year, however, the roof fell in. The Mexicans, seeking to develop their own computer industry, imposed investment criteria requiring foreign companies with sales in Mexico to establish plants that would produce some components of their products locally - known as local content. ''If you agreed to those conditions,'' said John F. Cadwallader, Data General's manager of government affairs, ''then the Government would consider your investment application. Since then, a lot of companies have put in proposals for integrating into Mexico. We haven't, because it doesn't make good economic sense, and haven't done much business there since.''

Gunmen firing automatic weapons from a passing car wounded two Yeshiva University rabbinical students and a 14-year-old Yeshiva High School student yesterday in a restaurant across from the university's campus in Washington Heights. None were seriously hurt. The police said that they had classified the shooting as a ''bias incident.'' They said they believed that it was connected to two recent shootings from passing vehicles, one June 7 on the Yeshiva campus and another June 9 at nearby Jewish Memorial Hospital. No one was injured in those shootings.

The Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, today that New Jersey's Congressional district lines violated the constitutional principle of one man, one vote. The lines for all 14 districts, reapportioned by the Democratic-controlled Legislature after the 1980 Census, will have to be redrawn in time for next year's election. The decision cast doubt on the validity of the Congressional districts of at least 16 other states, including New York. Kenneth Guido, the lawyer who represented the New Jersey Democrats, said that all those plans were theoretically open to challenge. Whether the challenges prevail would depend on the justifications the states were able to offer for their choices.

The Government reported today that consumer prices rose five-tenths of 1 percent last month and climbed at a rate of only 3 percent during the first five months of 1983. This latest increase in the Consumer Price Index, the most widely followed gauge of inflation, was attributed largely to higher prices for gasoline and natural gas. The rise in May was slightly smaller than April's six-tenths of 1 percent but well above the changes recorded in recent months, including declines in December and February and a rise of one-tenth of 1 percent in March. Economists said that, although the May index did not indicate a general reacceleration of inflation, there was a growing risk that this could happen as the economic recovery proceeded.

Four former directors of the arms control agency today strongly criticized a statement by the present director that the United States would abandon the MX missile if the Soviet Union gave up most of its medium and heavy land-based strategic missiles. The weapons make up the bulk of the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal. Answering questions at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the four former directors of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency said the proposal outlined by Kenneth L. Adelman would hurt United States negotiating efforts in Geneva on strategic, or long-range, missiles. But they disagreed on the relative nuclear strength of the United States and Soviet Union and on which nation bore responsibility for the stalled negotiations.

Charles Garbelotto gets up at 5:15 each weekday morning, leaves his wife and son in their home in West Nyack, N.Y., and drives 40 miles to the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn. Mr. Garbelotto searches for a space along Third Avenue, where cars are already double-parked, then weaves his way past hundreds of men who, huddled in knots, are drinking coffee, exchanging gossip or reading newspapers. A few others are hawking fresh fish or sportswear from makeshift stands under the towering green pylons of the Gowanus Expressway. Shortly after 7 A.M., Mr. Garbelotto enters the one-story, whitebrick converted garage-door factory that serves as the hiring hall for the Brooklyn and Staten Island waterfront. After waiting his turn in any one of 11 lines, he places what looks like a plastic credit card into a computer terminal, which generates a printed ''hiring form'' on an adjacent typewriter. Within two hours, after waiting in line a second time, he is on his way home.

The Department of Energy, settling a suit filed earlier this month, has agreed to resume a program of reporting financial data from the nation's largest energy companies. The settlement, reached on Monday, was disclosed today by the Citizen-Labor Energy Coalition, one of seven plaintiffs. The plaintiffs also included three members of Congress. In February, the department announced that it was ending its fiveyear policy of requiring the nation's 26 largest oil companies to report their costs, investments, revenues, cash flows and profits.

An article June 12 on states' abortion regulations failed to take account of various court injunctions.